Proceedings! 1969 American Society of University Composers

American Society of University Composers

Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Conference, April, 1969

Copyright © 1971 The American Society of University Composers, Inc. c/o Department of Music, Dodge Hall Columbia University New York, N.Y. 10027 Subscription Information: Proceedings of The American Society of University Composers are published annually by the American Society of University Composers, Inc. Subscriptions are available at $5 .00 per year (domestic) and $6.00 per year (foreign). Back issue rate: $5.00 per volume. Subscription requests should be addressed to:

Proceedings Editor American Society of University Composers Department of Music, Columbia Univeristy New York, N.Y. 10027, U.S.A.

Designed and published for the American Society of University Composers by Stanley F. Bennett, Portland, Oregon. Printed in U.S.A. by Lake Grove Printing, Box 1516, Lake Grove, Oregon 97034. American Society of University Composers

Proceedings/ 1969 American Society of University Composers

Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Conference, April, 1969

Copyright fl) 1971 The American Society of University Composers, Inc. c/o Department of Music, Dodge Hall Columbia University New York, N.Y. 10027 Subscription Information: Proceedings of The American Society of University Composers are published annually by the American Society of University Composers, Inc. Subscriptions are available at $5.00 per year (domestic) and $6.00 per year (foreign). Back issue rate: $5.00 per volume. Subscription requests should be addressed to:

Proceedings Editor American Society of University Composers Department of Music, Columbia Univeristy New York, N.Y. 10027, U.S.A.

Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Conference, April, 1969 Held at The University of California, Santa Barbara in cooperation with the Department of Music, University of California, Santa Barbara

The Society gratefully acknowledges the support of THE ALICE M. DITSON FUND in assisting the publication of this volume. American Society of University Composers

Founding Committee

BENJAMIN BORETZ, DONALD MARTINO, J. K. RANDALL, CLAUDIO SPIES, HENRY WEINBERG, PETER WESTERGAARD, CHARLES WUORINEN

National Committee

ALLEN BRINGS, RICHMOND BROWNE, DAVID BURGE (Chairman), DAVID COHEN, OTTO HENRY, HOMER KELLER, JEFFREY LERNER, JOHN ROGERS , CLIFFORD TAYLOR

Executive Committee

ELAINE BARKIN, BARNEY CHILDS, CHARLES DODGE, PAUL LANSKY, RAOUL PLESKOW,

NICOLAS ROUSSAKIS, JOAN TOWER

Editors of Proceedings

ELAINE BARKIN, BARNEY CHILDS, PAUL LANSKY Contents/ Proceedings, 1969

7 PANEL DISCUSSION: Recent Developments in Electronic Music Hubert S. Howe, Jr. Introduction John Clough Computer Music and Group Th eory David Cohen Yet Another Sound Generation Program Emmanuel Ghent Paper-Tape Control of Electronic Music Synthesis Max Mathews GROOVE, A Program for Real Time Control of a Sound Synthesizer by a Computer Robert Moog An Objective Look at Electronic Music Equipment

39 PANEL DISCUSSION: The Relation of Licensing Organi-· zations to University Composers; Chairman: Peter Racine Fricker Participants: Martin Bookspan, ASCAP Carl Haverlin, BMI

' ' 57 PANEL DISCUSSION: Should Composition Be Taught in Universities, and if so, How? Chairman: Joel Mandelbaum Participants: Richmond Browne Barney Childs Paul Earls Bernhard Heiden Claudio Spies David Ward-Steinman

89 BERTRAM TURETZKY, Contrabassist Performance Demonstration: The New World of Sound

93 MEMBERSHIP LIST, November, 1970 PANEL DISCUSSION: 7

Recent Developments in Electronic Music

Moderator: Hubert S. Howe, Jr.

Participants: John Clough

David Cohen

Emmanuel Ghent

Max Mathews

Robert Moog 8 Introduction

HOWE: When we consider the problems that composers are currently dealing with in electronic music, it is apparent that, while there are still many problems to overcome, there have been great advancements over the last few years from the mod est beginnings of the late 'forties and early 'fifties. It was not too long ago that the primary components in an electronic music studio, with the exception of tape recorders and micro phpnes, were not designed for musical purposes at all. The early "classical" studios provided the means to explore qualities of sound not previously associated with music, but they provided little, compositional flexibility. :The field of electronic music received a tremendous boost in the early 'sixties with the development and wide distribution of electronic music synthesizers by the R.A. Moog Co. of Trumansburg, New York and Buchla Associates of Berkeley, California. The primary advancement in the case of both of these systems was the concept of voltage control, which allowed the operating characteristics of different instruments to be determined not only by internal controls on the front panel but also by externally generated signals. Thus, the ways in which musical parameters could be controlled were focused upon as separate problems, to which different solutions were provided by different kinds of controlling devices. (Even today, th~ pfimary difference between these two systems is the manner in wl1ith they treat control voltages.) ' . ' ; l;hese systems, and other similar synthesizers which have appeared since, have developed in two directions. One is the assemblage of what might best be described as an "electronic live performance instrument," in which the controls are sim J?lified. keyboard instrument.")

The other direction in which these systems have developed is the assemblage of large systems which not only allow individual sounds to be structured in great depth, but also permit a certain amount of automatic or programmed control over musical characteristics. One of the first semi-automatic controlling devices was the Sequential Controller or "sequencer." The sequencer allows a certain number of control voltages, which may be used to control any musical parameter, to be preset and then performed sequentially, so that the first element of the series is repeated after the last. By combining sequential voltages with randomly or manually generated voltages, a power ful range of control is provided. There are clearly several ways in which further programmed controls can be introduced into an electronic music synthesizer. One is through the use of a binary input mechanism, which would allow all -of the control voltages corresponding to a !J1USical passage to be prerecorded and played back in real time. Another is through the use of a small digital computer to generate the control voltages for the system directly in real time. Either of these methods allows the combination of live and predetermined controls. Finally, the greatest range of control is provided by using a digital computer to synthesize an entire passage of music which is converted to sound through a digital-to-analog converter. While this method allows-indeed, requires-total flexibility in preprogramming, it does not allow any manual intervention in real time; there is no "live performance" at all. Our panelists represent a wide range of experience in these different areas. We are fortunate to have one of the pioneers in the development of voltage-controlled electronic music synthe sizers, Robert A. Moog. Another panelist, Emmanuel Ghent, describes an intermediate-level automatic controlling device which can be used in a variety of ways to provide an interaction between live and automatic control. Max Mathews, the next panelist, discusses a program which employs a small computer to control a number of analog sound generating and processing devices. Finally, David Cohen describes a computer sound generating program, and John Clough discusses some aspects of a complete language for music generation. IO JOHN CLOUGH

Computer Music and Group Theory

I will begin with preliminary remarks on two topics: First - existing programs and languages for computer sound-generation, and second - the mathematical theory of groups. These remarks will be informal and confined to information needed as back ground to the central topic of this paper - a language feature for sound-generation, based on the theory of groups. I will explain the function of this language feature, and suggest its potential by means of a musical example, and by means of a brief glance at one of its deeper implications.

Since the late l 950's when work on computer sound-gener ation was begun at Bell Telephone Laboratories, at least a dozen universities and colleges (and probably nearer twice that many) have reached various stages in the implementation, development, and productive use of sound-generation programs. Two notable aspects of these efforts are ( l) composers are deeply involved in the programming itself and (2) the several programs developed display some significant differences from one another. The second of these aspects is surely due in part to the first. 11 In any case both aspects have contributed to wholesome growth. We need diversified research in order to expand the practical limits of computer sound-generation, and in order to make informed decisions about future research. Beyond this, and more important, is the matter of different compositional re quirements and different degrees of scientific maturity among composers. There is no one best sound-generation program and there is no one best language for music specification. Ideally, each of us should be able to choose, according to his needs, from a range of available programs and languages. Therefore, the new language facility which I will shortly describe ought to be regarded as an extension of present facilities. No broader claim is made. Specifically, the facility is a proposed extension of MUSIC V based on the mathematical theory of groups.

Before discussing the language facility itself, I will place before you a few fundamental notions of the theory of groups, trusting that those who are already conversant with this topic will not mind spending a few minutes in recall, and that those who are not conversant with it will acquire without undue discomfort the small amount of insight necessary to the present purpose.

I will proceed informally from an example of a group to a review of the properties of a group as manifest in that exampl~ and in two other examples. In example l(a) we have the celebrated group comprised of the classical operations of transposition, retrograde, inversion, and retrograde inversion, as performed on a series of pitch classes.

EXAMPLE l(a)

G = [T, R, I, RI] illustration of group axioms: (1) closure: R @RI = I (2) associativity: (R @RI) @ T = R @(RI @ T) (3) identity element (T): R @ T = T @ R = R (4) inverses: R@ R = T group operation: "followed by" relations: R2 = 12 = (Rl)2 = T This set of 4 classical operations is indeed a group in the mathematical sense, for it has all of the following properties: 12 (1) Closure. Any one of the 4 operations, followed by any one of the 4 operations, is equivalent to one of the 4 operations. For example, if we take a series of pitch classes and then write down a second series of pitch classes which is one of the 12 R forms of the first series, and then write down a third series which is one of the 12 RI forms of the second series, the third series will be one of the 12 I forms of the first series. (2) Associativity. Given a succession of any three of the operations, it makes no difference whether we regard the first two or the last two as constituting a single operation. The example shows this for the succession R,RI,T. (3) Identity element. One of the four operations has the property that when it follows or is followed by any of the 4 operators, the result is equivalent to that operator. In this group the identity element is T. Example 1(a) shows one such case. ( 4) Inverses. Every one of the 4 operations is paired with another one of the 4 or with itself so that the pair of operations (performed in either order), is equivalent to the identity ele ment. For example, R followed by R equals T. When we have considered two of the operations together we have used the expression "followed by". The concept "followed by" is therefore the group operation for this group. Now summarizing all this and making a definition: A group is a set of elements (which may be operations) and a binary operation on the set, having the 4 properties of closure, associativity, identity element, and inverses. In example l(b) we have a group whose elements are the integers zero through 11 and whose group operation is addition modulo 12. The four group properties are illustrated, and can be easily verified. EXAMPLE 1 (b)

G = [O , 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11] illustration of group axioms: (1) closure: 7 (j) 8 = 3 (2) associativity: (7 (j) 8) (j) 1 = 7 (j) (8 (j) 1) = 4 (3) identity element (0): 7 (j) 0 = 0 (j) 7 = 7 ( 4) inverses: 7 (j) 5 = 5 (j) 7 = 0 group operation: addition modulo 12 relations: (1)12 = O Example l(c) shows a group where the elements are again 13 operations and the group operation is again "followed by". This is the group of six congruence motions of figure A, an equilateral triangle - the six motions which cause the figure to occupy exactly the same space as it did before the motion.

EXAMPLE 1( c) .& FigureA Congruence motions of fig. A result in the following positions:

G = [s r r2 f fr illustration of group axioms: (1) closure: r2 0) f = fr (2) associativity: (r 0) f) 0) fr= r 0) (f 0) fr) = r2 (3) identity element (s): r 0) s = s 0) r = r (4) inverses: r 0) r2 = r2 0) r = s group operation: "followed by" relations: r3 = f2 = s

EXAMPLE l(d) G = [s r r2 r3 r4 r5 r6 r 7] illustration of group axioms: (1) closure: r 0) r3 = r4 (2) associativity: (r2 0) r4) 0) r3 = r2 0) (r4 @ r3) = r (3) identity element (s): rr 0) s = s- 0) r7 = r7 (4) inverses: r2 0) :r6 = r6 (j} r2 = s group operation: "followed by" relations: rB = s Each of the six motions is represented below figure A by a figure showing the re-orientation of figure A caused by the motion. The figure labelled s represents no motion at all or some multiple of a 360° rotation bringing the figure back to its original position. The figure labelled r represents a 120° rotation in the direction of the small arrow. (It also represents a 480° rotation or an 840° rotation, and so on, but I will ignore these redundancies from now on.) The next figure, r2 , represents a 240° rotation in the direction of the arrow. The 14 figure f represents a flip about the vertical axis, turning the figure upside down, and replacing the angle bisected by the axis in the same position. The figure fr results from aflip, then a 90° rotation in the direction of the arrow, and, finally, fr 2 represents a flip followed by a 120° rotation. Here again, the group properties can be verified without much difficulty. Obviously the motion s is the identity element.

Two parenthetical remarks: (1) Unlike the first 2 groups mentioned, this group is not commutative. f followed by r equals fr, but r followed by f does not equal fr; it equals fr 2 • (2) Example 1 shows the relations for each of the groups discussed. Relations are equations involving the identity ele ment and other elements from which the entire group can be generated.

It is important to bear in mind that while a given group may have a certain concrete representation which interests us in a particular case (and this concrete representation may be one of many concrete representations of the group), every group has an intrinsic structure that is independent of such represen tations. There is no higher study of structure in the abstract than the theory of groups. It is for this reason, not just because the two familiar sets of musical entities, [T I R RI] and the integers mod. 12, can be regarded as groups, that this branch of mathematics is profoundly relevant to music. The particular kind of group with which I am presently experimenting in computer sound-generation is like the [T I R RI] group in that its elements are operations, but the group may take on internal structures dissimilar to and far more complex than the group of classical operators. In general the process is as follows: The composer forms sets of quanti tative data in the memory of the computer, either by direct input via punched cards, or teletype, or whatever, or by the execution of his program to generate the data in memory. These sets of data may represent a number of types of musical entities but in the simplest and most frequent case, they represent partial or complete specifications for sets of notes or note-like events. The composer then defines transformations upon his data in the form of programs, which function as the generators of a mathematical group (not necessarily a finite group). Each of the transformations modifies the data in some way but does not change its format, so that any subsequent transformation is applicable. Having established his sets of data and defined his transformations upon those data, the composer can define successions of transformations; these are 15 analogous to words in group theory. Finally, he can construct hierarchies of variously transformed data sets. The composer has the power to construct quite complex structures and to exert the desired degree of control and the desired kinds of control at various structural levels.

I have been speaking as if this facility now exists. In fact it does not exist in the complete form that I have described it. I am presently attempting to embed the facility in the MUSIC V program, while using MUSIC IV to do some of the related experimentation.

I will now describe an example based on the foregoing which is designed not to overwhelm musically, but rather to clarify principles and suggest a potential. We construct a collection of events as follows: On the rectangular co-ordinate system of example 2(a) the horizontal or X-axis represents time and the vertical or Y-axis, pitch. In the upper-right quadrant of this co ordinate system we place a regular octagon, two of whose sides coincide with the X and Y axes. The length of one side of the octagon is arbitrarily set at 1 unit, which makes the overall dimensions of the octagon roughly 2.4 units X 2.4 units. Inside the octagon a number of more or less horizontal lines or tracks are located as shown. Considering the uppermost 3 sides of the octagon as one track and the lowermost three sides as still another track we have in all eleven such tracks; these are numbered in figure 2(a).

11 v= pitch 10

2 9

0 2 x=time

Figure 2(a) 16

0 2

Figure 2(b)

(x 1 =1.28, v' =2.121

Figure 2(c)

Points are located within the figure as follows: The X co ordinate of the first point is zero. The X co-ordinate of the 2nd and all succeeding points is obtained by random choice of an increment from three permitted values, and the addition of that increment to the X co-ordinate of the preceding point. To obtain the Y co-ordinate of any point, having already found its X co-ordinate, we choose a number 1 thru 11 at random and determine the Y co-ordinate of the corresponding track at X. However the probabilities of choice are weighted 17 in favor of the lower numbered tracks.

The net result of all this is to distribute points within the octagon more or less as in figure 2(b ).

The density of points increases as we move from the top of the figure to the bottom. And the X and Y values are quantized in such a way that no two points have the same X value but several points may have the same Y value, as they do have where the tracks run parallel. Thus, when figure 2(b) is played and each point becomes a discrete sound, we have a number of repeated pitches, but no simultaneities. One parameter is not shown in figure 2(b): the X co-ordinate of each point re pre sen ts not only its time but also its stereo channel location. As we move from left to right the points move gradually from channel A to channel B. However, unlike the time parameter, the channel parameter is permanently attached to each point and is invariant under the transformations about to be described. Having thus constructed the collection of data, we now define a group of transforms upon that collection, which is simply the group of rotations of the figure within the plane which bring it into congruence with itself. Starting from any given orientation of the figure there are just 8 such motions, including of course the identity motion of zero degrees rotation. By a congruence motion for this musical purpose we under stand that the octagon and all points within it are rotated around the center of the octagon while the X and Y axes remain fixed. Following the rotation, the new time and pitch for each point are determined with respect to the fixed X-Y cm-ordinate system. As shown in Ex 2(b) and (c), if the figure is rotated 45° counter-clockwise, the point (X,Y) is translated to (X',Y'). For example, if X=l.90 and Y=l.80, it turns out that X'=l.28 and Y'=2. l 2. Both time and pitch are changed.

To s~ee whgt_§11_ch transformations mean in terms of the over all collection of points, refer to example 3. 3(a) is the same as 2(b) without the individual poin ts.

Channel location, symbolized by A and B, is a function of time; low and high density, symbolized by L and H, is a function of pitch. Now skip to figure 3(c), which shows a 90° counter clockwise rotation of 3(a). In 3(c) channel location is a function of pitch, and density is a function of time. 3(b), which is the 18

(a) (b) (c)

(d) (e) (f)

(h) (i)

Example 3 same as 2(c), is a 45° rotation, a transformation halfway be tween 3(a) and 3(c). Here channel location and density are both functions of time and pitch. The earlier and lower a point, the farther toward channel A, and vice versa; the earlier and higher a point, the lower its contextual density, and vice versa. 3(e) is the retrograde inversion of 3(a); 3(g) is the retrograde inversion of 3(c). 3(d), (f), and (h) are halfway transformations between these in the manner of 3(b). RI relationships also obtain be tween 3(b) and (f) and between 3(d) and (h). 3(i) is a reiter ation of 3(a). An unrepresented parameter in example 3 is the time vs pitch quantization, which rotates along with the A-B and L-H axes within the octagon. Thus the repeated pitches of 3(a) and (e) are transformed into the simultaneities of 3(c) and (g). (At this point the author presented two taped examples 19 based on the above, produced on equipment at the Oberlin College Computer Center and Bell Telephone Laboratories.)

The mathematical group underlying this example is of the simplest type; it is a cyclic group of order eight whose charac teristics are shown in example 1(d). (A cyclic group is one whose elements can be generated by a single generator - in this case a 45° rotation.) The cyclic groups are very simple, but not without attractiveness of structure for musical purposes; by comparison, the richness of structure in other types of groups is beyond description. If you will grant that the potential for structuring sound even with cyclic groups is considerable, you would surely agree that the potential for structuring sound with more complex groups is - fantastic. As a parting speculation, I would take note of the increasing attention given by mathematicians to algebraic manipulation by machine and to computer-aided solutions of group theoret ical problems.* One imagines a compositional process in which transforms designated as group generators, together with struc tural desiderata are input to the computer. From these inputs the machine would generate an appropriate group and an appropriate assortment of words in the group which fulfill the composer's structural requirements.

* Cannon, John J., "Computers in Group Theory: A Survey", Communications of the ACM, 12: 1, Jan., 1969. This article includes an extensive bibliography. 20 DAYID COHEN

Yet Another Sound Generation Program

The flexibility of existing computer synthesis programs would appear to make new programs unnecessary. Most of the criticisms concerning difficulties of coding or instrument design can be overcome through conversion subroutines or the main tenance of a library of previously designed instruments. Yet some problems remain, especially for a composer with no programming experience. A program which combines simplicity of coding with an interesting range of possibilities could well serve as a point of departure for the investigation of computer techniques. PERFORM, written in FORTRAN IV, is such a program. The options available to the user are fixed and cannot be changed except by rewriting or expanding the program. But the amount of data required to specify a note is reduced to a minimum. The form in which data must be coded is simple enough that it becomes feasible to punch cards directly from a score without first making a coding sheet. It will become clear from a description of the coding 21 method used- for PERFORM, that the program is oriented toward realization of more or less conventionally conceived compositions. One of the most important simplifications, the elimination of specified starting or action times, precludes the possibility of repetition, modification, or variat~9n of segments of a composition through "player" subroutines. This program is best suited to the performance of explicitly. notated scores in which accuracy df pitch, rhythm, and ensemble takes pre cedence over nuances in the control of other elements.

The basic operation of PERFORM modifies a fixed wave form by an amplitude attack and decay. For each computer run, the user must provide data to generate the wave and envelope forms desired. As in the Bell MUSIC programs, the forms are stored as tables of values, and the number available depends on the amount of internal storage which can be allocated. The first data card is used to specify how many wave and envelope tables will be generated in that run. It is followed by cards which provide data for either of two procedures available to generate tables. In the first procedure, partial number and percentage are alternated to generate complex waves through sine synthesis. Up to twenty-four partials may be combined. The second procedure provides for "graphing" the wave or envelope form by listing alternate X and Y co ordinate points and choosing one of several interpolation methods available. A routine is also provided to build complex wave forms from previously generated forms other than the sine function.

Once the tables are computed, all cards are read in note card format, eliminating the necessity of an operation code. Note cards are read and performed in a single computer pass and must be arranged in the order in which the notes should occur. Although the user must hand sort the note cards, he is relieved of having to compute starting times.

Note card format consists of fixed columns for the speci fication of wave form, envelope form, coded pitch and octave numbers, duration in . beats, beats per minute, amplitude, envelope time control and number of simultaneous voices. Except for pitch and octave numbers, data is automatically retained when not respecified. This feature simplifies note card preparation but must be used with care in simultaneous attacks because it could interchange data between voices. 22 In addition to the basic operation described above, PER- FORM provides for a number of modifications activated through further coded instructions on the note cards. These include pitch or dynamic vibrato, reverberation, glissando and the use of a graphed melodic line. For example, 1 punched in the specified column will produce a dynamic vibrato at the number of cycles and percentage of deviation given in two additional data fields. The efficiency of the basic program is lessened by the checks which are made to determine if any of the optional modifications are being employed, but this is the cost of built-in flexibility.

PERFORM requires the same kind of digital to analog conversion as the various Bell MUSIC programs. The subroutine which packs and writes the output tape will have to be re written to fit the conversion facility available. Other than this no modifications should by necessary, except for the usual differences between versions of FORTRAN IV.

The method of generating wave forms in this program has provided an easy way of investigating an interesting class· of complex waves - those that contain a selection of upper partials with no fundamental. For example, if one generates a wave containing equal percentages of fourth, fifth, and sixth partials and specifies a pitch two octaves below the desired root, the resulting sound approached that of a major triad. The separate tones, however, tend to merge. A special instruction is available which allows the combining in one table (wave form) of multi ple cycles of different kinds of previously generated waves. This produces greater distinction of separate tones. When the same block chordal structure (or its transposition) sounds for more than a few seconds, this method is more efficient than combining separate voices.

(The presentation concluded with recorded examples of different wave forms and a brief composition employing the chords described in the last paragraph. While the supply lasts, a complete listing and "User's Manual" for PERFORM is available from David Cohen, Music Department, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85281.) EMMANUEL GHENT 23

Paper -Tape Control of Electronic Music Synthesis

My first interest in electronics as applied to music was in developing a system to permit accurate coordinated perform ance of works composed for instruments playing in completely independent tempos and meters. The heart of the system was a punched paper tape reader. This device triggered the signals which were in turn recorded on magnetic tape. On playback the signals were transmitted to all performers of a chamber ensemble. By mean·s of a filtering decoder, each performer heard through a tiny earphone only those signals intended for him. This system also made possible the precise synchronization of instruments with pre-recorded instrumental sounds of elec tronic music.

Once this specially designed paper tape reader, or coordinome 24 as it was called, was available, several other applications germane to the synthesis of electronic music became evident: ( 1) gating audio signals, (2) gating pulses which in turn trigger other devices such as envelope generators, and (3) binary coding of the paper tape in coniunction with a digital-to-analog converter, as a means of providing control voltages to sound synthesizing equipment.

f. The gating of audio signals is the most primitive appli cation. Up to 8 input channels are available, one per horizontal "channel" of punched holes on the paper tape. The signal appears as output only when there is a punched hole in the channel assigned to that particular point. The duration of the signal will be in direct proportion to the number of consecutive holes and inverse relation to the speed of the tape. The partic ular tape reader used in the coordinome employs star-wheel contact triggers so that consecutive holes are read as a con tinuous signal. Use . of a photo-electric type tape reader for this application would result in a rapid on/off flutter of the signal. Rhythm, or timing sequence, is represented simply by distance on the tape. This system provides a simple and effective method for synthesizing up to 8 channels of very brief pitched signals, that in subsequent playback are used as signal cues to performers. In a classical studio where voltage-controllable equipment is not available, this approach makes possible the synthesis of a long line of notes each of which may be recorded on any of 4 or more channels of magnetic tape in precise rhythmic relation to each other and at a tempo variable from very slow to ex tremely fast. The procedure is to tune 8 oscillators, or appropri ately prepare any 8 sound sources, patch the desired output arrangement so as to specify which "note" goes to which channel of magnetic tape, and record on as many channels of tape as desired. The composer then proceeds in similar fashion with the next 8 events, and so on. In another use one might prepare several lengths of paper tape each of which was punched so as to be synchronized with the others. The events rhythmically programmed on each paper tape segment would be recorded on a separate magnetic tape. Subsequent mixing of the audio tapes would provide a complex but precisely related audio tape of 1 to 4 channels. Related techniques may be used to simplify some of the more complex pro9lems of synchronizing already synthesized materials. Still another use is the distribution of 1 or more already 25 synthesized lines of music among 4, or even 8 channels of audio tape. An illustration of this appears in HEX. 1 During the first electronic "cadenza" two musical lines, one treble, the other bass, are rotated in space, simultaneously, but in opposite direction and in specific speed relation to each other (5 :3).

2. Many of the applications described above may be much more elegantly realized if 8 envelope generators are available. In this circumstance the procedure would be to patch the 8 input signals into the 8 envelope generators and use the punch ed paper tape to gate the appropriate voltage thereby providing a pulse which in turn triggers the respective envelope generators. The envelope contour may now be adjusted for each note or event. When all 8 have been satisfactorily adjusted the sequence is recorded on the desired distribution of magnetic tape channels. Many variations of this are possible, including some which approach the art of improvisation. 3. The third type of paper tape application is entirely different. Punched holes are now used to represent the binary encoding of digital information, which upon conversion through a digital-to-analog converting interface, will supply the appro priate control voltages to such equipment as voltage-controlled oscillators, amplifiers, band-pass filters, etc. The simplest form of such a system as the coordinome, for example, makes use of a single character reader; that is, a device that reads 8 bits at a time. The significance of each bit depends on how it is patched into the interface, as for example, 6 bits for pitch and 2 bits to select among 3 or possibly 4 envelope generators.

The amount of programmed information can be greatly increased by one of several means: (1) A block-reader reading blocks of characters, perhaps 12 characters at a time, will make 96 bits available. (2) An analog memory device works. by sampling a succession of bytes (each of which may com prise 2 or 3 characters), and holding the converted voltages until a pulse triggers the simultaneous release of these voltages to their assigned destination in a particular oscillator, filter, etc. (3) A digital memory device operates by transferring the punched tape information byte by byte to a group of digital buffer registers. Upon the arrival of a trigger pulse

1 Emmanuel Ghent, "HEX, An Ellipsis for Trumpet, Tape and Instruments",1966. 26 all the information is transmitted to the appropriate digital to-analog converters, and then to the pieces of equipment to be controlled. When using any of these three memory systems, some means of addressing the encoded information is required. This can be accomplished by assigning some of the bits of each byte to carry address information, or alternatively, by including a byte-counter in the design, and assigning each byte to a fixed or externally patchable destination.

To illustrate the versatility of programmed control I will play a set of coordinome-generated variants of a pitch line that parallels the opening contrabassoon line of HEX. Using the identical segment of punched tape, enormous variety is obtainable by transposition of up to 6 octaves (turning a knob to add a bias voltage), by inversion (reversing the polarity of the voltage), by literal retrograding (reversing the direction of tape motion), by tempo changes over an enormous range (20: 1), or by modifying rhythmic relations through improvised sudden changes in the speed and direction of the tape. Com pression or expansion of tempered pitch intervals is also under the control of a knob. A further dimension of variation is available through envelope modification, frequency modulation, ganging of oscillators, filtering, or any of the standard means available in the electronic music studio.

Rather than proceeding to the more elaborate punched paper tape devices my own interest turned to computer-control of synthesizing equipment. I had the good fortune of being invited by Max Mathews to participate in the GROOVE system that was then being conceived at Bell Telephone Laboratories. The system as currently operational at Bell Labs not only is the equivalent of about 14 coordinomes running in parallel, but is vastly more powerful because of its enormous capacity for real time computation and editing. Since Dr. Mathews will be giving a detailed description of the operation of this system, I will close by playing several excerpts from HELICES (violin, piano and tape). The tape was synthesized entirely by means of the GROOVE system. M. V. MATHEWS 27 and F. R. MOORE

BELL TELEPHONE LABORATORIES

GROOVE, A Program for Real Time Control ofa Sound Synthesizer by a Computer

In developing GROOVE we were originally trying to attach both analog sound synthesizing equipment and a keyboard to a small computer. We wished to introduce nuances of perfor mance into computer music which we felt were very much absent with the kind of computer music in which one punches a score on cards, feeds it into a computer, and gets the result back a few hours later. When we first thought about this, it seemed to us that if we did exactly what we just proposed, that is, attached a keyboard and a synthesizer onto a computer, and put a very simple program between these two, that there was a very great danger of imposing on the computer the limitations of the other keyboard instruments, like the organ, rather than improving the keyboard control of the synthesizer by means of its association with the computer. Further thought convinced us that the desired relationship between the per former and the computer is not that between a player and his instrument, but rather that between the conductor and his orchestra. The conductor does not personally play every note 28 in the score ; instead, he influences, hopefully controls, the way in which he is producing in real time. This is probably a greater task than human beings can do. Instead, the computer should have a score, and the performer should influence the way in which the score is played. His modes of influence can be more varied than that of a conventional conductor who primarily controls tempo, loudness, and style; he can, for example, insert an additional voice of his own or part of a voice, such as a pitch line, while the computer supplies the rhythm. He should also be able to modify or edit the score which is in the computer memory. Furthermore, the computer should not only remember the score, but it should also remem ber all of the conductor's functions, so that when the conductor achieves a desired performance, it can be replayed by the computer from memory. These concepts led to the GROOVE program, which we would like to describe and demonstrate for you.The equipment which is involved is shown on Figure 1.

DISPLAY CRT

DISK FILE DDP-224 D- TO-A CENTRAL CONVERTERS PROCESSOR 12 SBIT 14 OUTPUT AND AND 2 VOLTAGES MULTIPLEXER MEMORY t2 BIT KNOBS 4' AND CHANNELS +3D4 ["' -- A-TO-D WAND cp CONVERTER

TYPEWRITER

SAMPLING RATE OSCILLATOR

Figure 1. Block Diagram of GROOVE Computer System The central part of the equipment is a DDP-224 computer. 29 Attached to it are a number of devices. The synthesizer is attached by means of 14 electric voltages which the computer generates. These voltages can be used in any way, legitimate or illegitimate, to control the synthesizer. Also attached to the computer is a disc memory, and this is perhaps the most important part of the system. This particular memory holds roughly one hour of these fourteen functions, plus the other things that the composer is inputting. This amount of time is quite reasonable for composing. Furthermore, this memory is in such a form that it is easy to create and modify these functions. You can immediately go back to any time in the composition; you can freeze time at that moment; you can change either all the functions at that time or one of the functions at that time in any way you want, without affecting the rest of the composition, and you can hear these changes as you are making them.

One way in which the user interacts with this system consists of an organ-type keyboard. A keyboard, we have found, is one of the most effective couplings between a com puter and a human being; the normal keyboard is probably better suited to human use than any subsequent technical device that's been developed. It's also nice to take advantage of all the practice that the many pianists in the world put in. There are some things that are not appropriate to a keyboard. For this purpose we have seven knobs that one can twist. These generate functions in real time. There are some things that one wishes to define analytically, and for this purpose one uses a typewriter in non-real time to type in descriptions of periodic functions such as a repeating rhythm pattern and to type in the way in which these various keyboards, knobs, and memory interact in the program to produce the 14 control functions. There is a tempo knob, an oscillator which deter mines the sampling rate of functions which control the syn thesizer. One can change the tempo of the piece without changing the frequencies as would happen with a variable-speed tape recorder, so this is a true tempo control. A cathode ray tube can display any particular subset of the fourteen functions. Figure 2 shows a sample display. One can see the instant of current playing time sweep across the scope as shown by the vertical column of dots and one can also stop or freeze time. Watching the scope is a good way of following the score. It is not a good way of actually synthe sizing the frequency line; the scope is not as accurate as your 30 ear, so if you want to tune up a note you freeze time and actually listen to it, and adjust a knob until you get the pitch you want. This makes your ear the final and, we think, proper judge of pitch parameters.

Figure 2. Real-Time Display The best way to give you a feeling for the operation of the program is to describe the fabrication of a short piece. The sample consists of thirteen repetitions of a short Bartok piece for two violins called "Play Song" in which a number of distortions are introduced. Most of the distortions are in the frequency scale which could be compressed, expanded, and inverted. Also the two voices could be transposed separately. The distortions were controlled by three knobs. One knob when in its center position produced zero intervals in both voices; in other words, reduced everything to a monotone, a purely rhythmic pattern. If the knob was turned clockwise 31 about a quarter-turn, you got the normal intervals that Bartok composed. At about half clockwise, you got double the normal intervals. If you turned the knob counterclockwise, you got the inverted intervals, etc. The second knob controlled the spacing between the two voices in frequency and the final knob moved the two voices up and down together. In the 13 versions the first one is normal, the second one is transposed up; in the third we have collapsed the intervals down to zero; in the fourth one we've moved the second voice up and left the first voice normal, etc. All these changes were accomplished merely by knob settings.

What are the steps that one goes through to create the piece? The first thing was to synthesize a metronome, which means make the synthesizer generate a metronome sound with one of its oscillators. Then listening to the metronome at quite a slow speed, to accommodate lack of piano playing skill, one of the two voices was played into the memory of the machine. Time was reset and the other voice was recorded. Some mistakes were made in doing this, so the functions were edited to correct the wrong notes and also to put in the accents, the slurs which you don't get properly with the keyboard, and the dynamics. There's a facility in the program for repeating things, so the score was repeated thirteen times to get the basis for the total song. Next, certain expressions were typed to make three knobs control the pitch distortions in the manner we have described. Next, the total score was played, changing the knobs between each repetition to get the particular frequency trans position or distortion desired. The knob settings were changed only between playings of the "Play Song" but one could actually change these knobs continuously as a function of time or in any way that he wished. Furthermore, one heard the piece as it went along so that he could decide how he wanted to change it. This then got the basic pitch pattern into the memory of the machine. Next, the parameters which affected the tone quality were defined. The~arameters were the attack rate, the decay rate, the vibrato amP-liti!de, and the vibrato rate. Four knobs were defined to control these parameters by typing more expressions, and the composition was played once more with "feeling". All these functions were now retained on the disc file. Finally, the composition was played while making changes in the analog synthesizer - adjusting filters and re verberation, and a recording was made. Thus, the final product was built up by a number of passes, each of which added something to the final product. 32 R. A. MOOG

An Objective Look at Electronic Music Equipment

From the instrument designer's point of view, we're now at a crossroads. In the last twenty years electronic music instrumentation has progressed from the so-called classical studio and the use of voltage control, both of which are fairly simple and rather general techniques, to the point where three or possibly four more specific directions seem imminent. This panel seems to be stressing computer control, but a great many musicians, especially performance-oriented musicians, rather than composition-oriented musicians, are interested in more direct and manual control over the sound generation and modification.

The first direction from the sort of studio which is fairly common in institutions around the country is what I call the multi-track studio. If we go back twenty years or so, we recall that the first tape recorders to be developed were monaural machines. The classical studio technique included the use of as many as four or six machines, all going simultaneously, each 33 with their own recorded likes of sound, and a mbcer to combine these into the final composition. Then, in the l 950's a big technical breakthrough came about; we had stereo machines. And then another breakthrough, there were three track ma chines and then four track machines. Only as recently as two or three years ago, eight track recorders became generally available. Now sixteen tracks are the order of the day in the commercial music world. There is no doubt that using a multi track tape recorder saves a great deal of time in assembling a composition by tape over the procedure of recording each line of sound on individual tapes and then trying to synchronize them into the final composition. However, I am not suggesting that the multi-track studio is a more satisfactory replacement for the classical studio. In the multi-track studio, the tape recorder is the means for assembling, storing, and synchronizing lines of sound, whereas -in the classical studio technique, the tape recorder is used primarily to manipulate individual sounds and to assemble these sounds into individual, independent lines. They are basically different technical media.

I believe that the musical quality of Carlos and Folkman's now popular record Switched On Bach indicates the potential, the degree of control which can be achieved by the multi track technique. Carlos is the first bona-fide electronic musician I know to use an eight track recorder for the complete electronic realization of an extended piece of music. The multi track tape recorder in combination with a convenient-to-use mixer and some voltage controlled sound generating and modifying equipment which can be manually and conveniently manipulated and perhaps preprogrammed to a small extent by sequencers, is the next logical step in the development of this. And beyond that it's conceivable that the tape recorder may be dispensed with entirely in favor of real time perform ance by a group of musicians.

There are two possible directions after the multi-track studio, and I think both of these are a couple of years away right now. The first is the use of a small digital computer to control analog equipment. For the present line of synthesizers generally available, either from us, Buchla or Ketoff in Italy, or whatever else may become available, the present state of the art is such that there is not enough accuracy to be able to preprogram and have the pitch stability at the level that is necessary for music. One can hear beats of a fraction of a beat per second. In terms of a percentage of a typical note in the 34 treble range, this is better than a tenth percent pitch accuracy. At the present time voltage-controlled oscillators which have a musically useful range of say five or six octaves, are no more stable over a working period than perhaps one or two percent. Our main effort these days is improving osclllator stability to arrive at the next generation of equipment which will be stable enough to be computer controlled by a so-called open-ended program which does not involve "returning" the computer to the oscillator every five or ten minutes or so, as some of the programs now do. One big advantage of using a small computer to control analog equipment over direct digital generation of the sound is that we still preserve the intimate manual control that one can exercise over analog equipment. There are a great many devices available which produce continually-varying volt ages in response to hand motions. Among these now are key boards, band manuals, touch sensitive plates, theremin-like capacitance-sensitive antennas, and so on. One can program a great many parameters in direct digital/audio synthesis but the one class of parameters that no one has even tried to describe are these elusive inflections that, for lack of a better word, performers call "musicality" or "expression". As far as I can see, and perhaps I don't see far enough, the ability to program these, explicitly, is a long way in the future. In fact, the only practical way I can see is to create them by analog means, then analyze what you've done, and then reconstruct it with a digital program by sampling techniques. Another big advantage in the use of a small digital computer to control analog equip ment, is the convenience of having everything in one small studio-sized room. A small digital computer of the type I'm talking about, can be purchased these days for the same price as a multi-track recorder. An eight track recorder costs about $12,000 and so does a digital computer of a PDP 8 size for instance. There is another possibility, yet, beyond these three that I've mentioned which we're in the process of realizing for one of our customers. It's a complete sequencer controlled studio. There will be a large number of sequencers and the hope is that entire pieces, or at least large sections, can be preprogrammed by sequential control and then run off and recorded without splicing, without stopping. If we examine the logical extension of this approach and limit ourselves to a size of sequencer complement that we can reach with both hands extended, while sitting, something perhaps six feet wide and five feet high, then we're limited to two thousand knobs. If we assume that the musical piece will be specified by two thousand parameters and we examine what it takes to specify a typical 35 uncomplicated piece of music, we see that it's possible in theory to realize a few minutes of music this way. The problem is, can a person looking at a field of two thousand notes comprehend what he's set up? This is the big question in my mind. Nevertheless, within two or three months, a sequencer controlled studio will be set up in the State University of New York at Albany.

A few remarks on the sequencer: As soon as any control device with a built-in pattern, a built-in mode of repeating is used, it immediately exerts its own structure on the music. Those of you who have heard music which used a sequencer, notice that you can easily detect it. I'm not making a value judgment. I'm just pointing out that it does write your piece for you in a rather general way. Any pattern that is recognized by the listener to repeat with absolute regularity or has a part that is absolutely regular, shows up very rapidly and does color the composition. My own impression is that a composer must literally keep a strong, restraining hand on all machine generated patterns if his music is to be free of the taint of boredom. The relative prices of the multi-track studio, the classical studio, the computer controlled studio, the sequencer con trolled studio, and a performance instrument are just about the same. That is, assuming professional quality tape recorders, an average institutional studio using any one of these possibili ties will cost between $20,000 and $30,000. Interestingly enough, most of the money for any of these studios will go not to the sound generation, nor to the sound modifying, nor to the sound controlling, but to the sound storage, or to the information storage. In all of these the same amount of sound producing equipment is necessary and in round numbers this comes to something between $5,000 and $10,000. The rest of the cost goes into the storage or computing equipment. One last remark on the relative advantages of direct computer control of analog equipment: If we assume that we leave the tape recorder out of the picture and enter all the information on digital magnetic tape, or other digital storage means, then you can realize a composition without analog recording at all. We then have a composition which will not deteriorate and will not be subject to the fidelity loss of conventionai tape techniques. What do we miss, is the ability to easily and cheaply store analog sounds and manipulate them as electronic music composers have done for the last twenty years. 36

HOWE: Barry Vercoe has been working on an interesting project. He's here and I'd like to ask him, if I may, to say a few words about it.

VERCOE: I would like to report on some work in progress in the area of computer-generated sound. Of the various programs and programming methods being used or tested at different installations around the country, the only one, it seems to me, which currently affords the composer the necessary precision with which to specify (and obtain) the sound patterns he really wants is Music 4B, an extension of the earlier Bell program which has been developed at Princeton by Godfrey Winham and Hubert Howe. That program's dependence on an IBM 7094 with BEFAP, together with the proliferation of so called third generation machines, have recently made necessary a Fortran version which will run under any system given the necessary compiler and core size. Any thoughts about the use of general-purpose languages such as Fortran or Algol for practical sound generation will usually raise the following two questions. First, does the language of communication influence the composer ideas? In other words, do different artificial languages have different thresholds of expression for the composer? It is certainly true that pure machine code affords a very low level of logical perspective in programming and that any higher level language would represent a distinct improvement. The question, then, concerns the extent to which a special-purpose language for composers would be even more preferable. Second, is the composer in any way inhibited by excessive running times? To assume so is to face the question of whether the cost of faster sound generation - that is, resorting to some amount of machine code - is worth the trouble. Of course, these questions need not be answered nor even 37 faced. However, it seems to me that an open forum of compo sitional ideas expressible in this medium will not exist until the problems they represent have been met. My own inclination has been to investigate the feasibility of a special-purpose acoustical language for use on IBM 360 machines. This involves the development of a compiler which will translate programs written in that language into highly optimized machine code. The language as currently implemented is simple to use, yet powerful in its semantic properties. No final run-time statistics are yet available, but recent tests have shown programs to be from three to four times faster than all-Fortran programs, and about 50% faster than Fortran orchestra descriptions that call assembler-coded unit generators.* I have chosen IBM's 360 series on which to become machine dependent because of the upward-downward-compatibility that exists between models and because such models are soon likely to make up more than half the educational computing power in the country. I am planning to continue this work as time and resources permit, and hope to be able to give a more complete account at some future date.

* Mr. Vercoe informs us that these figures have since been doubled. - Ed.

PANEL DISCUSSION: 39 The Relation of Licensing Organizations to University Composers

Chairman: Peter Racine Fricker

Participants: Martin Bookspan, ASCAP

Carl Haverlin, BMI 40 FRICKER: This panel deals with the relation of licensing organizations to universities. There is a suggestion here that universities are in some way different from other users of music, and I hope that this· discussion will elucidate that. I'm not a member of either ASCAP or BMI, but I am a member of the British Performing Rights Society. In nearly five ytiars in America I haven't found out too much about the procedures and the ways in which these organizations work, perhaps be cause I have been at a university. I do have the feeling that as composers we often allow ourselves to be exploited; perhaps we are so anxious to give ourselves performances that we aren't too concerned with other aspects of music which are equally im portant. I suggest we start right away by asking first Mr. Bookspan of ASCAP and then Mr. Haverlin of BMI to speak, and then we throw the meeting open to discussion.

BOOK SP AN: Thank you. First I must tell you, personally and on behalf of the society I represent, what a pleasure it is to be in your midst; to give you something of the story of the per forming rights societies as they pertain universally to composers and creative talents, and to question whether there is really any pertinence to the title of the discussion this afternoon, Per forming Rights Societies as They Pertain to University Com posers. I don't think the university composer is a bree.d unto himself and is in some occult fashion disengaged from the cre ativity of composers who happen not to be university com posers. If the institution of a performing rights society has any pertinence in our musical culture, and of course it does, it has that pertinence universally: within universities, outside of uni versities, and wherever creative work is being done.

First a little bit about performing rights societies in the main. Some of you, I am sure, are associated with one or another of the American performing rights societies, and some other of you are not. The performing rights societies exist primarily, if not exclusively, for one purpose, and that is to see that the composer receives due financial reward for his creativity. There was a time, and I don't think that time has passed to any measurable degree, when, as Dr. Fricker said, composers in their wish to have their works performed sold themselves short. It's to prevent this kind of thing from not only developing but really from being in existence at all that performing rights societies came into being, first in Europe and then in the United States, around the period of the First World War. All of . this of course is tied in with copyrights; a composer who has a copyrightable work should receive recompense for the per- 41 formances that work gets. It's very difficult at some times for the individual to negotiate on his own behalf, and so organizations have come into being which do the negotiating for him. Where educational circumstances and situations are concerned, we seem to be in a grey area. There is no question that in the commercial marketplace there are hard and fast obligations on the part of users, whether those users be broadcasting organi zations, hotels which employ orchestras or small ensembles. bars, or wherever there is music performed for public con sumption; and that if music is being used in a place that operates for profit, there is no question at all under the existing copyright law that there is an equity in the performance which the creator is entitled to. In the educational sphere, as I say, we're in a grey area. Under the existing copyright law there are legitimate and legal questions that educational institutions can raise and indeed have raised with respect to their responsibility. Our (ASCAP's) legal counsel, Mr. Herman Finkelstein, who is one of the most outstanding experts on international copyright law, as indeed his counterpart at BMI is, has stated that regard- less of the moral obligation which exists on the part of universities to see to it that composers receive recompense for the per formances of their music, a university may choose not to recog- nize that obligation, and in that case, Mr. Finkelstein, represent- ing ASCAP, will never sue such an institution. In the com mercial marketplace there's no question: Where there's an infringement, there's a suit to see that that infringement does not recur, and that the original infringing performance does not go unsettled. In the case of the universities, Mr. Finkelstein feels that this is an area where, as far as legal action is concerned, ASCAP will not enter into the courts.

Now, where does that leave you gentlemen as composers? As composers you're functioning in areas and your music is performed under circumstances which, according to our defi nition, should bring a return, not only from the financial point of view but also from the point of view of your own stature, in your own eyes, and in the eyes of your colleagues. The American Society of University Composers came into being about five years ago, interestingly enough at the same time as ASCAP's involvement in licensing educational institutions. An institution is licensed by ASCAP in a very simple fashion: For the payment of a very low annual fee. The fee is pegged on the total enrollment of the university, and for the payment of such a fee the institution has the privilege of performing all non dramatic music within ASCAP's literature. I say non-dramatic 42 because, of course, grand rights have always figured in dramatic works, operas and stage pieces for which music is composed. But any non-dramatic work which is part of the ASCAP litera ture is thereby available to the university without the payment of any further performance fee. On the other hand, if there is an unlicensed situation at a university the composer does not receive credit for the performance and certainly receives no payment. Let's get to the rosy side of the picture: When music is performed at a licensed educational institution, the composer benefits in two ways: First of all that performance redounds to his credit and to the credits that he accrues over the years; secondly, every time there is a performance, the society, which collects money from the institution, then multiplies the income it receives from the institution, and that money is distrib.l1ted (there are quarterly distributions), and part of that money goes into the pocket of the composer. It's a very simple process, it's a very necessary process, and it's a process in which all of you can share, and from which all of you can benefit; and you all can be helpful to the performing rights societies. I stress ASCAP because that's the organizatidn which I rep resent, but BMI, represented by Mr. Haverlin, is also actively engaged in seeing how it can benefit the creative composer whose music is performed, no matter what the circumstances, whether they're licensed educational institutions or unlicensed. BMI has not yet, that I know, Mr. Haverlin, licensed colleges and universities. I'm certain that that's in the BMI future. It has to be, since the organizations which represent composers must represent composers wherever their music is performed.

Now I said from the point of view of the institution, the annual fee is very low. The highest fee which any institution is required to pay, if it is to become a signatory to an ASCAP educational agreement, is $200 a year, and that's for institutions with enrollments of 10,000 or more. The scale slides down for lower enrollments. For enrollments between 5,001 and 10,000, it's $125 a year; for enrollments between 1,000 and 5 ,000, $75 a year; and for institutions with a student enrollment less than 1,000, $25 a year. You would be amazed to learn how stiff the resistance is in some quarters to taking an educational license with ASCAP. The figures are ridiculously low, and yet there are music depart ments, chairmen, and college and university presidents who will raise all manner of objections, even stating that the fee is an excessively high one. There is also resistance right now pending the passage of a new copyright law which will, we hope, be 43 enacted in this term of Congress. The current copyright law has been the law of the land since 1909 - sixty years. There have been extraordinary changes on every level of American life in those sixty years, but copyright protection - which a composer or a writer, or anybody who is entitled to one - is an archaic law which has existed for sixty years. Just to give you the most salient difference between the current copyright law and the law that prevails generally throughout the world: After it is registered a copyright goes into effect for twenty-eight years and then it is renewable for another twenty-eight years, a total of fifty-six years. After that time the copyright is no longer in effect, and that work, what ever it may be, falls into the public domain and brings its creator zero, financially. The copyright law in Europe protects the creator for his lifetime, and extends copyright protection to his estate for fifty years beyond his death. This is one of the key principles in the pending copyright law, lifetime plus fifty years copyright protection. I think you're all fully aware of the heavy responsibilities which the performing rights societies feel toward fulfilling their obligation on behalf of their members. And, as I say, all of you can be instrumental in helping us discharge that responsibility. Some of you, I'm sure, are department chairmen. You can, perhaps more effectively than we , make the strong impression on those who are in charge of the administration of such matters in the colleges and universities. Obviously, we exist to be of whatever material help and to give whatever support we can, but I think in the final analysis much of the solution to this in creasing problem rests with you. I say increasing because I needn't tell you to what extent the colleges and universities are becoming the focal points of performance in this country, and to the extent that all of you are directly and personally involved and would directly and personally benefit, we turn to you. Together we can break down the resistance and (this is perhaps going to sound terribly condescending) bring home not only the moral responsibility to those who preach the moral law every day in the week, but also make them realize that without the acceptance of a firm commitment which they owe to their own staff - whom they are the first to point to as bringing honor, prestige and stature to their institutions, - their composers - they are negligent in not seeing to it that their composers are rewarded for the performance of their music. These administrators are living in the dark ages and hopefully together we will shed some light on the situation. Thank you. 44 HA VERLIN: I fully subscribe to everything my colleague has said and I want to point out something interesting; that there is no parochial point of view either in his great organization, or in ours in relation to the inusic which you gentlemen represent; it has always been this way; Mr. Bookspan, I salute you. I would like to add that in bringing about this devoutly wished-for resolution of this financial problem, you are also doing justice to composers whose works are used on campus but are not members of your organization. This is an ethical responsibility which rests on both the societies and representatives here. I am reminded of a story told to me by Carlos Surinach some years ago after I retired from my position as president of BMI. He said to me, "The next time you have an opportunity to strike a blow, strike it for me," and he told me this story (the name of the university will be withheld to protect the guilty.) He was asked by a university if he would like to pay his own expenses, because they had no funds, and come to the university to be present at a performance of a new work of his, which I think he had written for Martha Graham. He did and it cost him several hundred dollars. When he got there he sat in back of the hall until the conductor finally asked him to come up and explain a problem raised by the first fiddle. He went up and found that the conductor's score and every orchestral part was copied by Xerox. Now this is a polite form of cannibalism that I personally cannot understand. I said to him that I would strike a blow, and I have.

I would like to go directly to something that should interest all of you. I have before me the Eighth Annual BMI Orchestral Survey, prepared by Ulysses Kay, a one-time staff member of Broadcast Music Incorporated and now a university composer. It is such good news to me because I started in this general field of music, peripherally, as far back as 1924, a year after the first recording of a symphony by an American composer. When I went to BMI one of my major concerns was to do some thing about serious music. (We called it "concert music" since "serious music" frightened the public.) I was alarmed by the fact that in the U.S. in 1947 we had a most extraordinary group of composers yet their music was not being played. I decided I would do something about it. I spoke with orchestra managers and European and American publishers but had no luck at all until a solution was reached in 1951; we called a conference of university educators and composers and told them that we thought that we should do something collectively "to increase the growth of serious music in the United States and encourage young student composers in high schools, univer- 45 sities, and conservatories." The record of the preceding year was abysmally low in the use of American music and contemporary European music. Since the orchestras could play the great war-horses of the past at no fee whatsoever, there was a tend- ency to play fewer contemporary copyrighted works and more of those in public domain thereby saving less than a janitor's salary by the end of the year. With that as a preamble I would like to tell you what has happened since that year. The composers whose works were played in 1966-67 by 570 American and Canadian orchestras were: For the period prior to 1900, 238 Europeans and not one American; for the period from 1900 to 1967, 251 Europeans and 547 Americans, and 14 from Africa and Asia, for a total of 1050 composers. As far as titles go: Pre-1900, 1464 European, no American, no Afro-Asian; post-1900, 840 Europeans, 1043 Americans, 19 Afro-Asian. Now we come to performances of the titles and of the composers: American composers, 1940 to 1967 ("our generation") - 505 American composers had 926 titles for .3046 performances, an average of 3.4 performances per title. There were 204 European composers in that same period, as against our 505 (better than double in our favor - I hate to be chauvinistic but it's high time somebody was) who had 423 titles (against our 926) getting 1768 performances, 4.1 performances per title. The Afro-Asians had 14 composers, 19 titles and 34 performances, an average of 2 performances per title.

Now listen to this and you will see the crux of the problem for years to come. The pre-1900 "standard," the public domain, the great war-horses, the over-familiar, the trite, the ones we all love but once in a while could do without, the extra perform ances we are forced to listen to; 238 composers with 1468 titles and 13,955, call it 14,000 performances, making an aver age of 9.5 performances per title. In order to benefit the com posers of our country we must bring home one significant fact to the orchestra managers and broadcasting stations of America: That they mistake and underrate their audience, they think they would not like something by Paul Creston, or Dallapiccola, or Wuorinen or whoever. They think they would like another rendition of...it's in the book .. .it's already rehearsed .. .let's do the 1812 .. .let's do Romeo and Juliet (for which I have a high regard.) ...

I wanted to bring you some specific indication that the curve 46 is becoming asymptotic. But no curve goes up unless there is some pressure behind it, and I think a great deal of pressure toward this end can be brought about by individuals in this room and by others of this organization. Thank you very much.

FRICKER: I would like to thank both of the speakers on behalf of myself and the audience, and now call for any questions ...

AUDIENCE: I'd like to know the qualifications for joining both of the organizations.

BOOKSPAN: ASCAP qualifications are very simple. A composer must have either a published work of any kind or any com mercial recording of his works in order to qualify for member ship. In the absence of either of these two qualifications, he can qualify for associate membership merely by the perform ance of any one of his works at a licensed institution. It need not be a published work. This qualifies him for associate mem bership, for which he is required to pay no dues until either he has a commercial recording or there is a publication, at which point he pays annual dues of ten dollars a year. That's the total investment of a composer in ASCAP membership. His membership application comes before the board of directors of ASCAP, which is composed of twelve composers and twelve publishers, and that board examines his application. It usually takes about six weeks between application and election and I don't think I need to go into the reasons for joining a perform ing rights organization. I think the benefits and the advantages to you individually must be very clear in your own minds and I would strongly urge any of you who are unaffiliated with either ASCAP or BMI to investigate and see how you individually can benefit from being a member.

AUDIENCE: If the conditions are such that only a published work is sufficient for membership, what is the function of the board's review of the application for membership?

BOOKSPAN: I should say that its function is merely to make sure, that there is indeed a qualifying situation there, that the composer does have either a commercial recording or a pub lished work. AUDIENCE: It's hard to see how this would be an action of 47 the board.

BOOKSPAN: Well, ASCAP is a member-organized, member controlled organization. It functions purely and simply by its board of directors, who then engage a management team to operate the machinery that's required for the functioning of ASCAP, but every member of the society has, in effect, a stake in every other member, and the board of directors represents the total membership of ASCAP, which is now more than 14;000. In the barely more than a year that I have been with the society as its coordinator of concert and symphonic activities, I know of no case where an individual who applied for member ship and was qualified was not elected.

HAVERLIN: We differ from ASCAP in this regard, we are not a membership organization. We were founded as a commercial organization for the reason of creating competition, during a distant and dim past which Mr. Bookspan and I did not share. We do not have a membership problem. Our gateway, so to speak, is lower than ASCAP's. The pattern was set at the time we took the American Composer's Alliance in as a body; it had some hundred composers, not all of whom had been recorded or published. Indeed, in 1941, the number of recordings were very few, and the number of publications were almost as small, but it was obvious that there was no member of ACA who was not qualified to have his works protected against infringements, to collect when and if they were published. So with us it is only to keep out the "sweet singer of Minnetonka", so to speak. If a non-published, non-recorded person applies, qualified people would look at a submitted manuscript or two and say he's in.

AUDIENCE: What's the cost of affiliation?

HA VERLIN: We have no membership costs at all. We take in no money, unlike ASCAP. They are a membership organization, we are not; we just have an open door.

AUDIENCE: There is a $10 fee per year for membership in the ACA.

HA VERLIN: That may be so; we dealt directly with ACA and signed an agreement. 48 AUDIENCE: What is the relationship between ACA and BMI and to whom does orte apply?

HA VERLIN: One should apply to ACA directly if one felt that it was beneficial to come under their umbrella, to get the bene fit of the association with their members. You would then automatically become licensed by BMI because of the relation ship which exists between the two organizations. You could, on the other hand, come directly into BMI without joining ACA.

AUDIENCE: If application were made directly to BMI, would BMI not refer the application to ACA?

HAVERLIN: No, ACA is entirely independent and we would not refer an application to them.

AUDIENCE: Why can't a composer belong to both organi zations?

HAVERLIN: This is an exceedingly thorny question. One or the other must make the collection. Either ASCAP or BMI must collect for Howard Hanson, for example; we couldn't both collect, the bookkeeping would be incredibly difficult and I can see no purpose in it. There are cases where a lyricist belongs to one organization and a composer to another; even that is thorny.

BOOKSPAN: It's thorny indeed, and yet these circumstances do exist. Generally, in such an instance where there are col laborators on a dramatic work, be it broadway theater or opera, if one belongs to one of the organizations and the other to another, then they either agree that together they would be represented by the organization of one, or one organization would waive its equity in that specific work and turn the entire work over to the other organization.

I would just like to add one thing further to your question about qualifications - whether there is a clear-cut qualification where there is a publication or a commercial recording. In 1969 there are several means of publication. Take for example a score that exists on tape, whether the tape is to be used in association 49 with a performance in a concert hall, or the performance on the tape is self-contained and ready for concert hall presentation. Our legal people are working on copyrighting the tape so that this constitutes publication.

I've just jotted down the names of a few younger composers, university based, who are members of ASCAP and who have been very helpful with respect to bringing to their adminis trations the need for a serious consideration of the university educational agreement association. They are: Morton Subotnik, John Eaton, Eric Salzman, Salvatore Martirano, David del Tredici, Henry Weinberg, Elliott T. Schwartz, Joel Chadabe, Lucas Foss, and George Rochberg. As I said before, together we can bring home to recalcitrant institutions the need for the proper support of the productivity and the creativity of you and your colleagues.

AUDIENCE: I wanted to go into this idea of ASCAP versus BMI exclusively. Both ASCAP and BMI publish symphonic cat alogues, and much of the logging of broadcast curves is done by title. Would it not be possible for a composer to be listed in the catalogues of both organizations by the title of works according to publisher? As it stands right now, the composer is limited only to a BMI publication house or to ASCAP, and a work that is picked up by an opposition house brings in no royalties; in other words, he would lose royalties if he changes publishers. I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to give him credit for those works that would be represented by a publication house in the other establishment, since the logging is done by title anyway.

HA VERLIN: It would be almost impossible in the system that was used during my administration, and as far as I know is even perfected now, for a title to be misread. There are probably something like eleven hundred "I Love You" 's, undoubtedly fifty-five "Black Eyes," and "Green Fields." When there is a question the record number is found and traced through. We have experts who run this down and I'm sure that the same thing is done at ASCAP. There may be some grey area but I would say that the chances that a composer would lose any money by a similarity of titles are very small. 50 AUDIENCE: I would like to ask Mr. Bookspan if ASCAP licenses FM radio stations?

BOOKSPAN: Yes indeed. Of the annual moneys taken in by ASCAP in all the areas which it licensed during 1968, over ninety percent of an income of about fifty-nine million dollars were proceeds from broadcast organizations; radio both AM and FM, and television. ASCAP has long had a very paternal attitude toward educational FM radio stations, and only now _has it concluded an agreement licensing educational television. Previously ASCAP granted a gratuitous license to educational TV. With the increasing involvement in the music making pro cess by educational TV our people decided that our grace period was over, had run its course, and that there had been a pater nalistic situation long enough. Now the composers were entitled to just recompense for the use of their music on educational televisiort, so an agreement has just been concluded with ed ucational television. With educational FM, however, we still have gratuitous licenses in effect, and I would think that the day is not too far off when a fee structure will be worked out with the FM educational broadcasters.

AUDIENCE: Does that mean that under the college agreement which the University of Michigan joins for $200 covering its Rockefeller Group and its band, it will be covered for its tele vision station?

BOOKSPAN: Yes, there is blanket coverage for every piece of non-dramatic music.

AUDIENCE: You said that we should go home and talk to our administrations about the license. I predict that a lot of us are going to be asked by our comptrollers and deans how much we are going to get out of a performance. Can you possibly tell us? Take a hypothetical case: A university has paid $ 200, it has ten or eleven thousand students; may I ask what I would get if a quartet of mine were played there?

BOOKSPAN: This I cannot answer. I'll tell you what you can tell them which has proved to be very effective in a number of cases - that the educational agreement represents a savings to these institutions over a period of a year in this way: When the 51 material is performed the music has to be rented from a publisher. If it is rented the publisher has two options: He charges a rental fee for the music and then on top of that a performance fee. If the institution is licensed there is no performance fee. There was a very large institution which about eight or ten months ago had had an ASCAP educational agreement in effect almost from the very first day that it went into effect, and after four or five years of being an ASCAP licensed organization, the head of the music department sent us a letter saying "Thanks very much, it's been a delight being associated with you; we feel now, however, that upon reflection and re-exami- na tion of the circumstances we will not renew our agreement with you once its current term expires". We did some very quick calculating and figured, on the basis of the programs that this institution had sent to us during the previous four or five month period, that they would have had to pay $700 performance fees on top of rental fees, for music for which they only paid $200. We communicated this information to the dean, and by return mail we got an answer: "Yes, please keep us on the list. You can expect our check in the next mail."

AUDIENCE: There are a Jot of us who don't rent music, we buy it. A lot of chamber music, or visiting performing groups, such as the Fine Arts Quartet, already own most of the music they play.

BOOK SPAN: The Fine Arts Quartet is a visiting organization. They themselves are either licensed or they pay performance fees for the music they bring. If they are in residence at a licensed institution, then their performances are covered by the institution's license. Your question is a direct one: A work of mine is played; how many credits do I accrue and how much money do I get? I can't answer that because I don't know.

AUDIENCE: The point system is so confusing that I don't know of any composer of serious music who understands it.

BOOKSPAN: Indeed, the credit system is a highly involved arithmetical computation and even I don't pretend to begin to know how it works. 52 AUDIENCE: Can Mr. Bookspan explain what the ASCAP awards are and how they effect the composel·s who are not published or recorded commercially; and can Mr. Haverlin say whether BMI also has a system which is comparable to the ASCAP awards?

BOOKSPAN: The awards system at ASCAP was instituted nine years ago. It came about because there are obviously many instances where the performance history on a composer is com pletely out of whack with the importance of that composer in the musical life of our times. For whatever reasons, this com poser does not receive the substantial number of performances in many areas where one would think that his stature and es teem would entitle him to. A slow-down system was instituted in the society with the agreement of those from whom the money was siphoned. A referendum was put to the membership asking if they would waive royalties due them in excess of $80,000 a year; that money that they waived would then be distributed to the composer we've just mentioned. And extraor dinarily, these composers of $80,000 plus said yes. Here are men who say "Yes, you can take money that is due to me out of my pocket and you can give it to the other members of the society." There is a fairly admirable degree of altruism there.

AUDIENCE: Will a composer get more if his works are per formed by a licensed institution?

BOOKSPAN: This is something else. A composer will receive nothing if his work is performed at a non-licensed institution.

AUDIENCE: But he may get an ASCAP award.

BOOKSPAN: That's right.

AUDIENCE: But will he get more than the award if he's per formed by a licensed institution?

BOOKSPAN: That's up to the awards panel. The panel consists of five non-ASCAP people, distinguished men of music who are not in any way connected with ASCAP. They gather together twice a year and go over the dossiers of every member of the society in the concert music area who has either applied for an 53 award or received an award in the past. With these awards, again there is a cut-off point; No composer whose performance income per year, including any award, exceeds $20,000 is entitled to an award. In other words if a composer receives a performance income of around $18,000, the top award is $2,000, so he is not eligible for a $2,000 award. He might conceivably be eligible for the next lower step award which is $1,500, but chances are that he would not because with an income from performances alone of $18 ,000 the panel feels that this com - poser does fairly well. Last year $336,000 was so distributed to members of ASCAP. I said the top award was $2,000; the bottom award is $250, and then it graduates up: $500, $750, $1,000, $1,250, $1,500, $2,000. By and large the composers who receive the awards are men who really can use it. The money is a tremendous boon to their way of life, and I think in a way that the composer not only feels that there's a financial recognition, but also that his stature is recognized not only in the general public market place but also in his own organization.

FRICKER: I believe there was a question whether BMI had any similar system. Would you care to comment Mr. Haverlin?

HA VERLIN: We approach this knotty problem of the have-nots in a different way. We are a poorer rel a tion, we don't have that group of stars that ASCAP had to whom they could go; Rodgers, Berlin, and so forth. We reached into another pocket, and went to such men as Harry Partch and Henry Cowell whose impor tance musically was not reflected in their performances, either by symphony orchestras or by broadcasting stations, and we literally agreed to pay them a stipend every year. My composer friends say that they thought that what we were doing was utterly wrong; I'm sure that we could do better and as time goes on we will. We both recognized the fact that the popular music must support that music which is not so popular. I only hope the day will come when the shoe will be on the other foot, and concert music will support the popular.

AUDIENCE: Do your organizations take for members only those who are one hundred percent creators of their works, or is there any place for arrangers and editors?

HA VERLIN: We have arrangers and editors if they are musical; that is, you couldn't just buy properties and come in as a com poser. If you did you could come in as a publisher. 54 AUDIENCE: I'm thinking particularly of 17th, 18th century works which are unperformable in their present state; when you have arranged or translated them you are the "composer," is that right?

HA VER LIN : In our book, yes.

BOOKSPAN: In our book too. Among the names that occur to me of such cases, the most recent, or one of the most recent members of ASCAP is Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, the conductor. How? By virtue of his orchestration of the Bach Toccata and Fugue in D minor. Stokowski is an ASCAP member, Eugene Ormandy is, arrangers of all stripes.

AUDIENCE: I address this to either gentleman; it's a kind of backwards question. I'm connected with a small fl y-by-night, educational, non-profit recording outfit, for recording new and avant-garde music. We are so non-profit that all the contribu tions we have from people in the form of services are voluntary, Now several times we have had to work to record with a com poser who's written me and said "I will voluntarily give up my royalty for this recording," and I write to a particular outfit that I shall not name and say, "Okay, can I have this license," and I get back a very brusque letter saying, "Nope, nope, sorry. you've got to pay anyway." What happens? Is there any possible way the composer in this case can donate, for the non-profit nature of the thing, and have it come off, without being stopped?

HA VERLIN: This is a right that neither of the licensing organi zations has anything to do with. This is "mechanical right" and it is generally either owned by the composer, if he's not assigned to a publisher, or by a publisher. Now if the composer was friendly and said "All right, you may record it," and then you wrote to the unnamed other who then said to you, "Never mind what the composer said;' you would have to see a lawyer to find out whether the composer's approval superceded the nega tion of the publisher.

AUDIENCE: I would like to have one of the gentlemen eluci date this relationship between ASCAP and various publishers. I want to know whether there is a subsidy, and what the licens ing arrangement is because it is rather a frustrating business when you join one organization, as many of us have , and find 55 out that there is a group of publishers you can't go to.

BOOKSPAN: I will give what I hope is the accurate ASCAP side of that question, which is a serious question. When I indi cated earlier that ASCAP is a membership organization, I em phasi'zed the individual composer aspect of the membership - what holds for the individual composer, the individual writer, also holds for the individual publisher. Publishers are elected to membership in ASCAP just as are individual composers. There are about 3500 publisher members of ASCAP and membership in the society excludes the possibility of the publisher's affilia tion with another of the performing rights societies. There are, however many publishers now who operate separate publishing companies, one of them ASCAP and one of them BMI, so that the publisher can assign the score to either of the two publish ing operations. If, however, you are a member, or you have had music published by a concern which operates only on one side of the fence, in which case you can be elected to membership of ASCAP or BMI; if that publisher is not interested in publish ing your next work, and you take it to somebody else who is affiliated on the other side of the street, and it is published, your membership in one or the other organization prevents you from collecting the performance royalties for the next work if it's published by the other. It certainly is a situation that all of us regret, and yet the mechanics of operating in this business, (we are operated under a consent decree from the Justice Department) make it impossible to exist in any other way. It's an inequity from the point of view of what a composer feels he's entitled to, and I think none of us would disagree with that point of view, and yet there is no way to handle it differently.

HA VERLIN: Because of our slightly looser organization BMI is not as bound as ASCAP is by these strictures. On occasion, very infrequently, when a BMI composer comes to us and says that an ASCAP publisher wants to publish his work, we have said to him that we would cooperate and pay him his share, period, because we don't have to go any further. Unfortunately that is very ·difficult due to the complex situation at ASCAP. It's not simply a matter of good will.

FRICKER: I'm afraid we've run out of time. Again I'd like to thank both of our panelists on behalf of all of us.

PANEL DISCUSSION: 57 Should Composition Be Taught in Universities, and if so, How?*

Moderator: Joel Mandelbaum

Participants: Richmond Browne

Barney Childs

Paul Earls

Bernhard Heiden

Claudio Spies

David Ward-Steinman

*Transcript edited by Joel Mandelbaum 58 MANDELBAUM: One aspect of our shared situation as uni versity composers is that we are all expected to teach. This fact may be almost coincidental to the universities which employ us, but it is certainly not coincidental to the students we teach, and particularly to those students who aspire to be composers and whose positions today are probably most analogous to our own some years ago. I think we all have memories from our student years of teachers and teaching practices - some more helpful than others - which we've stored as things to remember to either emulate or avoid. The hope today is that our panel members who cross the generations with vastly different amounts of experience in the teaching of com position, and in compositional styles that vary a great deal, can share among themselves, and with you, some of the experiences, some of the beliefs - in some way pool our resources and cross fertilize, as it were, ideas on the teaching of composition, with the hope that we might enrich the practice of composition in so doing.

The first question in the title of this panel, should compo sition be taught, will, at least for the time being, be addressed by indirection, because when we took a sampling of the view point of the members of the panel at the time that the panel was first set up, there seemed to be no negative answets to the question, "Should composition be taught?" among the panelists. The question we're going to start with treats the question some what indirectly, if at all, but I think is a little bit related, and it was first suggested in its present form by Mr. Spies, and I'm going to ask each of the panelists to comment on it, to comment on one another's comments if they see fit, and then from that point on, as the discussion evolves, I would like to throw it open to all. The question is: "Do we as composers have unique insights to communicate to our students by virtue of our being composers; what are they; and how may we best communicate them?"

SPIES: Well, it seems to me that the question of insights could be related to the simple analogy of a gardener. A gardener can cultivate plants; he doesn't manufacture them, but he knows how to deal with any of the problems relating to their welfare and their growth. We as composers and teachers fulfill much the same function; we don't manufacture composers; we can't tell anybody to be a composer, but we can do quite a bit in helping such a person to come to grips with certain problems that we all share, and to go about building up an ability to make decisions consciously and perhaps wisely regarding the composition of 59 music. How we communicate this is, I think, an individual problem. I don't think that we as composers are automatically suited to teach. However, if we can teach and are able to ver- balize clearly, then we have a great advantage in being able to pass on matters relating to compositional technique.

HEIDEN: Well, for me, one of the most important things has been the relation of the composer to the performer through a written document - score - any form of notation. I think we have, simply by having been closer to performers than the stu dent has, acquired a knowledge of how notation will work, and this can be a tremendous help to the student.

EARLS: I think there are a number of assumptions in the ques tion which are very interesting; one is that the teaching of composition is the job or responsibility, or the right of the com poser, accruing from some sort of insight that composers alone have. I really find that we have insights as composers which are unique. Whether these are viable or necessary in the teaching of composition is something I sometimes question. I'd like to re late this to the business of teaching a subject, and there are two dimensions to it I wish to comment upon. One is relevance, keeping current in the field, as you would have to do in any subject, whether it's music history or anything else. This re quires an internal commitment on the part of anyone teaching composition to at least be willing to challenge the past, to have a point of view which is a discernible point of view as a com poser, as a person; you don't have to insist that other people agree with this, but you must have some definable opinion and you must also have at the same time an open mind and keep informed, have a commitment to the current world. That, I think, is one of the necessities for teaching composition, no matter who does it.

The second dimension is a series of personality traits which are very desirable in teaching any subject, but particularly some thing like composition. These are paradoxes; one wants to encourage and be sympathetic to students, but on the other hand you like to feel that there are certain standards that you would like to have them come up to, and you will not let them stop, and you will not give your approval for whatever it's worth (and it's usually worth a great deal) until a certain level 60 has been reached. Thus you have a rather tough attitude along with an extremely sympathetic attitude; these are somewhat antithetical at times. The analytic attitude is something that we have with our own work and we should have it with the work of other composers as well. With our students, on the other hand, intuition is just as vital to it. Another aspect I would bring up in this respect is this abil ity to catch the faint trace of a vision of an idea within some thing that seems to be fairly amorphous. This always happens, or very often happens, in the early stages of someone's work, and a good teacher can find out what that's all about and cut away the edges and dig into it and at least be able to capture that larger vision. On the other hand I think that one has to insist upon very precise detail. You have to think in large terms and extremely small terms. These are all platitudes in a sense, but I think they are relevant to good teaching, no matter what the subject, and absolutely vital to composition. With this series of assumptions, I would then question wheth er you have to be a composer in order to do these things. I draw the analogy very often with people who teach writing. There have been many gifted people who have taught writing and who have had successful students, who have not been writers themselves. Sometimes it hasn't worked terribly well the other way. In fact, one searches very hard to find a person in the world of letters who has been a creative individual himself and has been a successful teacher. I don't say that this is a analogue with music, but on the other hand I think that there are some relationships here. I would then question the assump tion all of us have that composers are the ones who necessarily must be teaching composition. I think other people could some times do a much better job ot it.

CHILDS: I challenge to some degree Mr. Earls' suggestion that a teacher of composition may not necessarily have had to be a composer, and I think the challenge would apply in the teaching of those people who are obviously going to keep going and be composers themselves. If someone is really going to be a com poser as his life's work, you cannot teach him. He's going to learn something. Presumably one's job with such delightful people, and one rarely finds them, is simply to keep them in some kind of bounds. For the other person, who is content perhaps to write little tunes and who will go into high school teaching or something of this kind, and is taking composition because it's necessary for a degree, I think perhaps a non- 61 composer will do the job. But it seems to me that in line with what Mr. Heiden said, not only the business of how to write it down is important, but there also are insights into the curious nature of composerness that we all have had to learn. Simply, what does it mean when you grow up and get out of college and have to compose? In teaching we may concentrate more on getting the music on the paper, but it's just as im portant to me to teach my students how to make transparencies, what kind of equipment to use, things about performing rights organizations, what he can expect in the way of jobs, the almost professional skills that must also come in because I know some peopl~ who have graduated with master's degrees, let us say, in composition from reputable universities who are simply un prepared for the business of being composers. They may be able to write music, but they are completely at sea as to the machinery that we all have to take for granted in everyday existence as a composer in society - a member of what a friend of mine called the upper dregs. Only a composer can have these insights, only a composer can tell a student what he's going to have to face with performers of a certain kind, and maybe show him how to handle this, if he can. Only a composer who has done it can explain things about being present at rehearsals and how to behave towards certain kinds of conductors: all the stances that we have all had beaten into us by years of terrifying personal experience. A student who is pretty clearly going to keep on composing after he gets his degree will not just take over the marching band at Southwest Baptist Teachers' A and I, or someplace, and spend his life doing this. Something special and extra should be given to these people, above and beyond composition as an art.

WARD-STEINMAN: I think the tacit assumption under which the panel has begun this morning is that the kind of compo sition instruction that we're talking about is that toward the budding professional composer, and I would like to deal with what I think are at least the implicit broader implications of the topic as formulated and address myself to two other levels of composition instruction. The first level is the kind of com position that goes on, or ought to go on, in the theory and counterpoint courses. In some schools this is very neatly pack aged: "Chapter Six; you do the exercises at the end of the book," and so forth. But ideally, this can be taught very cre atively, as composition from analysis. I treasure a growing collection of "errors" in the Bach chorales, errors in the part 62 writing according to more traditional texts. I have my students analyze these to discover the reasons behind the departures - and there are always compositional reasons. I try to animate work of this sort from a compositional point of view, not just the technical and mechanical "Watch out for parallel fifths" point of view. Everything my students write is played in class, is corrected aurally, discussed, improved, changed where needed. I think this develops, hopefully, a foretaste for composition, some sort of insight into compositional choices on what is ostensibly a style study level, a historical level. This is one level of composition instruction that in a broad sense I think we all probably deal with - perhaps without realizing it - under the implications of the panel topic. The second level is the Sunday composer, one who has no intention of becoming a professional composer, but who wants to write, does write, obtains enjoyment from it, and takes a composition class. I think this person has to be treated in a different manner than the committed composer, and the dis tinction I make is that I tend to be less concerned about style and more about craft and technique. In fact, perhaps style should be the last consideration, certainly for an undergraduate composer. He has to learn his craft, his business of ha,ndling notes, much sooner than he needs to know how to deal with conductors or performing rights organizations.

At San Diego State we have a program which is set up in two ways: Composition is taught in the fall on a private basis to majors, and in the spring there is an open composition lab, which majors as well as non-majors take. This is limited only to people who have already shown some interest in composing, who have written a few pieces. Composition is not required for anyone, so we don't have the unyielding sand out of which we must sculpt unwieldy edifices. We have only people who do demonstrate some initiative. We have a very wide variety; people writing rock and roll tunes, graphic scores, etc. All this must be dealt with, and the only way to deal with it is on a contextual basis; that is, "What are the problems in this particular piece, in this particular style?" Again we try to arrange to hear every thing written, and encourage students to write for instruments available within the class. With the professional composer, one who is developing a commitment, who is going to be a com position major, one ought to do more toward shaping his style considerations and his awareness. The analogy I frequently use is that of the imaginary inventor on a desert island who spends his time reinventing the telephone and various other things already accomplished. The composer cannot afford not to 63 know what is happening, even though he may choose to write in this style or this fashion. He must at least know what everyone else is doing and understand the principles which are involved.

So on these three levels, the theory-counterpoint classroom, the Sunday composer, the budding professional, on all of these levels one can instill fundamental compositional principles, fun damental musical considerations. The aims in each case vary slightly; the goals are different. But the impulse behind all of these should be a fundamentally musical one. I think a com poser is perhaps uniquely qualified for this in that he is pre sumably working with the materials himself; he ought to be able to bring some enthusiasm, some vitality toward what he is doing. I have encountered the ex-composer teacher, that is, the composer who still teaches, but has given up composition as something that is just not worthy of his time, or he has run out of solutions. This is a pretty pathetic situation because all the juice is drawn, and the composition instructor becomes very effete. The blood is not there and it's a very uninspiring sit uation. I'm not going to get in to the issue of whether only composers must teach, or whether a theorist or someone else, like Boulanger, cannot teach. I'd say in general, however, that if a composer is working actively he ought to be able to com municate some of his enthusiasm to the student. If nothing else, a good teacher ought to be able to build the fires, or tend what is already there.

BROWNE: I have three points. I do think composers should teach, composers above all should teach; they're the people who have been inside music. Whether they can come back from that trip with anything to say is another question which you'll have to answer for yourself. But at best they may be able to come back with some idea of what's going on inside a piece of music at the level at which it's being created and also perhaps ideas that nobody else has on the level it's being perceived. I do think they should not teach composition. Composers have more important things to do than teach composition.

I was reminded the other day that teaching composition at an advanced level is a terribly frustrating and unrewarding business, not the least because you have a very strong feeling that you're not really very responsible for what takes place whether good or bad. Somebody pointed out that Schoenberg went from 64 being an absolutely abysmal composer to being a sublime one in two years, and I doubt that any teacher ever did that with a student. What can we teach, what can we give the students? I think it has to do with reminding students, no matter what our subject, of the universal nature of creativity; that they have it, though they may not believe it. It's a crime that the educational system has made them think that they don't have it. Our task is to devise ways of making them believe they do have it, to find it in themselves, to work with it.

I would support the proposition that no one can teach com position but that improvisation ought to be compulsory; that\ something hopefully a composer can do. My third point would have to do with our reasons, your reasons for teaching com position. I'd give a lot of thought to that. I've taught it; I don't teach it now. I'd give a lot of thought to whether I would go back to teaching it; I think it's a very bad thing for a composer to dci. I think it's quite harsh in a composer's own life to teach composition.

WARD-STEINMAN: I think the danger is that a composer may have so narrow a view of what he is doing that he cann~t see any other possible ways, and in this case certainly he should not teach. To teach at all requires a more catholic viewpoint and an admission that there are other styles, and other approaches, and the criticism should not be a priori, dogmatic, but con textual. If you can do this and put yourself in the position of the student composer, whatever his style or problems are, then you can help him a great deal.

SPIES: I would just like to briefly answer one thing that Richmond said. You can't bring Schoenberg into the picture without obviously bringing in a totally exceptional individual. The fact that he was self-taught is at the crux of this whole question. Essentially, I think, all composers are self-taught, be cause rio composer can teach a young composer those essential things which must come out of that young composer himself. What I meant in discussing those early piano pieces of Schoen b~rg that appeared in the second volume of the new complete works is that it's extraordinary that in two years he himself, exceptional as he was, could have progressed from a state of pretty acute ineptitude of writing to produce something like Verklarte Nacht. Now, what would have happened if he had had a teacher? That teacher would not have taught him how to write according to that teacher's precepts. He might have been 65 able to save Schoenberg some time, but essentially it's probable that that teacher would have done no more for him. I think what we all do in studying composition, or in teaching it, is to either become aware or make people aware of those pieces of music from which they have very much indeed to learn. I'm sure that this was essentially what Schoenberg's process of being self-taught amounted to. I think that as teachers we can provide an enormous amount of guidance in that sense, and we can give direction to activities on the part of young composers which would otherwise be guaranteed to be a kind of flounder- ing, and a kind of wasting of valuable time.

HEIDEN: The teacher is the first audience for the composition student. The student must learn from what he himself has written, and he may have written something entirely different from what he thinks he has. We must make sure that he knows what he has written. I know that I ask a hundred times, "Is this what you mean?" This is really the recurring problem.

EARLS: I'd like to somewhat second Mr. Browne's attitude. I think it really does amplify what I was trying to say. I think that it's absolutely essential for a composer, if he's willing, to be around a university or college, and to be an operative factor in any music program in the college. Whether he teaches com position is another matter. I actually think you do teach by being there, and I think we're probably thinking of what goes on inside classroom walls, when face to face with a student, as being the teaching of composition, when in fact that's the smallest part of the whole situation, of the teaching process as it exists. You're a composer, if you are a composer. You cannot be a bogus composer or someone who's pretending to be a composer. You 're continually active, continually writing, and you 're willing to put your neck on the line publicly. This is a stance that's absolutely essential for a budding composer to see, to realize that a person of supposedly rational mind is willing to go through all of this and that there is something to be gained by it, and it is a viable process. Just your being there as a model is extremely essential. That's the teaching of com position to me, and that in a sense covers what you were talking about too, Barney.

MANDELBAUM: Perhaps this is what you meant by "com poserness?" 66 CHILDS: Yes, yes! That's what I was trying to get at when I said that you can't teach somebody not to compose in that sense. All you can do is keep his mistakes working for him really. He's going to do it by himself if he doesn't have you. If he does have you then it is as his model. In answer to Richmond Browne: I believe too that it is very harmful for composers to teach composition. I think it's harmful for com posers to do anything but compose, and if they must do some thing let it be what they can do best.

MANDELBAUM: A number of things I think have come up in the opening remarks that may provide useful things as we're about to throw this open to others. I think that some of the paradoxes that Mr. Earls introduced, particularly perhaps the paradox between having to be open to students while maintain ing standards, may be an area for considerable exploration, perhaps especially in the context of Mr. Browne's remarks about persuading the students of the universality of creativity and any problems that this may run into with standards. I also think perhaps that Mr. Ward-Steinman might want to go deeper into what he means by the compositional point of view, and perhaps how this works out in class.

BROWNE: May I have a rebuttal for about two minutes?

MANDELBAUM: Please.

BROWNE: The compositional point of view, the thing the com poser can give, the reason he should teach, but not necessarily composition, is that he has the overview, he sees the piece in a large sense, he does not deal with it empirically or historically, if he's smart he gets away from the question of standards. That has to do with imposing your commitments. If you're commit ted go somewhere else and be committed. What Ben Johnston would say if he were here, and I'll say it for him, is that what a composer knows is you don't learn atomistically, you don't learn one little thing at a time, you learn by starting from here and seeing a big picture and then breaking it down to find out what it is you do know. That's something a composer knows. I'm not sure that some of the other people I've seen teaching in the music profession are fully aware of this. They come up from the ground in a heap of details. WARD-STEINMAN: Can I add to that for a minute? It was 67 addressed to me by implication. What I meant by the com positional point of view, in addition to this, was a concern with choices which all of us have to make, and in the best music I think we sense an inevitability about the notes and about the events. Why is this so? If this note is right are the other notes wrong? I think we all have to make these kinds of choices, either systematically, logically, intuitively or empirically, and in any case be very specific and down to earth. When I am analyzing traditional tonal music or other music for students, if the music is right and I think it is inevitable, I try to show them why. This is done simply by presenting them with alter natives, other notes, other passages, hopefully illustrating that what the composer did was the best choice. This leads to ex ceptions in all the standardized rules as they are formulated, and I think that this would bring the student (not only the composition student, but the history student and the theory student as well) into the working processes of music. Why is it the way it is? Why is this a great piece of music?

CHILDS: I'd like to reply. Have you read Edward T. Cone's article, "Beyond Analysis?"

OTHERS: Yes, yes.

CHILDS: I think you're making the same mistake in a sense that he almost makes, and that is that it's right because it's there. You're loading the dice when you give the student alter native possibilities because there is the right one by the fact that the composer put it down. If you, for example, had grown up in some isolated part of the world with only a record player which played a half-tone sharp, the first time you hear a per formance of Beethoven's 3rd symphony live, you're going to say, "It's wrong; why the hell doesn't the conductor take it up where it's right, where it ought to be?" I'm not going to enlarge upon your idea about "great" music and the inevitability of notes because this is getting into a stylistic difference. I think greatness is largely overrated, and I think that this business about liberating the spirit of creativity is also largely overrated.

WARD-STEINMAN: But we all make choices. We have to if we're putting notes down on paper. There ought to be some criteria for evaluating these choices. 68 CHILDS: Other than personal taste?

WARD-STEINMAN: I don't think, ultimately, that we can get away from that. Look, I think it's probably a common experi ence as composers that we recompose each other's music mentally. Whenever we hear something in a concert, and es pecially a bad piece, we think, "Why didn't he do it my way?" and so forth. You don't agree; I see heads shaking. Let me attack it from another angle. I'll say only one more thing about the idea of a masterpiece by quoting Malraux's definition: "Something which the imagination cannot improve."

CHILDS: Whose imagination?

WARD-STEINMAN: Yours, the "I". I will not extrapolate, I will not attempt to project views for anyone else, I will only say that in my own compositional choices I try to find the best possible combinations be they intuitive, empirical, logical, or systematic; but definitely there is a choice at work. I want this sound and not that one.

CHILDS: You can get the student to realize that he is faced with the choice-making problem. He's got to get some kind of shape in himself which enables him to distinguish his own bad from his own good.

WARD-STEINMAN: Well, certainly not my values but his own.

SPIES: That's all the whole thing is about.

BROWNE: Composers compose music so well and then they get bogged down trying to evaluate it. Frost is often quoted as saying: "You can't play tennis on a court without a net." The rest of it he went on to say is that we go on the court to play tennis, not to measure out a tennis court.

CHILDS: That's one of those flatulent pomposities that sounds impressive and doesn't mean a damn thing. Frost was unfor tunately given to that sort of thing in his last years. AUDIENCE: I would like the panel to think about who we 69 should teach composition to. Should the piano major who is engrossed in developing a professional technique have to come into one of our classes, or an historian?

WARD-STEINMAN: I don't think composition should be a required subject, but a foretaste of compositional activity ought to be provided in basic musicianship courses. Beyond that point, I think it should be elective on the part of the student. It's simply too hard to shape clay when there is nothing there to begin with.

MANDELBAUM: How does this square with your view of cre ativity being universal, Mr. Browne?

BROWNE: I don't know about his statement. I know what to do that does the student the most good; demonstrating that you are creative, believe in it, can do it. You're not about to make it harder for him. I think that you can probably do that better for a non-composer than a so-called composer. This phenomenon of the budding composer bothers me a great deal. They're the ones who write one piece, have a little success; you say, "Good." Ah, visions of Guggenheim.

EARLS: A couple of things come up in connection with this. One is this business of who does one teach. I teach some lower division courses like everyone else. I don't look upon that as a hunting ground for composers, or even as a trial period for composers. I don't view that kind of technical knowledge as being directly applicable to composition at all. I've thought a lot about this and I've taught this su bject for ten or twelve years. I really got to the point where I felt that they were teaching themselves; they were teaching their own subject, 18th century, 19th century part writing, or whatever else, and if they're successful they do that and that's about all; don't ex pect them to do anything else. I don't find a transference of skills, particularly in the last five or six years, from that to what one calls composition. In fact, I purposely tell them they're not being creative when they're doing that work, though I want them to do their highest quality work; I don't want them to confuse it with originally generated material. I don't, even though their originally generated material may be really redundant; at least to them it's original, and it's their own 70 material. I don't like that confused with exercises in 18th or 19th century styles. On the other hand as to whom do you teach, I would agree with Richmond Browne that everyone has creative potential. I happen to be a kind of believer in Adlerian psychology and follow that faifly closely. I think that all of us, or most everyone, does have some of this potential, and it's a very difficult thing to get all the circuits in the right direction so that it goes onward. I think there is a definite obligation and almost a sublime contract that takes place between a composer who's going to teach and someone else who says, "I want to be a composer." It's a contract between one who says, "I think you've got something to tell me," and the composer who says, "I think I've got something to tell you." The people whom I really enjoy dealing with, perhaps because they're not as threatening I suppose, are the people who are not going to be professional composers; I can see no reason at all to require anybody to go through the tortures of writing music. That's a decision that you make yourself, and once you've made it, then you have to go through it; there's no way to escape it. On the other hand there are a lot of people whom I think it's very good for, and I think it's a very healthy exercise for the individual in going through it and finally having to stand for something, finally having to produce something at the end of a period of time and say, "That's the very best work that I can do at this moment"; and you look at it and say, "It's pretty awful, isn't it?" But at any rate, at least there is an honesty about that situation.

MANDELBAUM: Are there any people here from schools which require composition of all undergraduates in music? It might be interesting to hear from anybody here who has taught such a class. Then permit me to step out of the moderator's chair for just a moment as the only one who has, just this last term. I found it one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. Having done it once, I'm very much for it; I wasn't before. I think I agree with Richmond Browne that creativity is univer sal. I think I disagree with Paul Earls about the sense that one seeks a kind of honesty and recognition of how poor one's best efforts along these lines may be. I see, rather, a kind of elation in the creative experience itself, and in the process of convert ing ideas from whatever source into sound, into performance, as Bernhard Heiden stressed. It seemed to me an experience quite relevant to anyone who is pushing for any kind of career in music; both for himself and of course for any potential "budding composer" whom he may meet later on in his pro- 71 fessional work.

HUBERT S. HOWE : I want to ask a question that arose in the business about theory teaching being somehow different from composition. What do you do with a student who wants to be a composer, is real gung-ho about this, has written a few pieces, and they are terrible, and the only thing he is studying right now is theory and he's getting a C or D in that? Do you still apply this business that anyone can compose? It seems to me that at least if you somehow remove this aspect of talking about his personal work and force him to take exercises of one kind and deal with those, this might be a lot better, in a sense, then teaching him how to be a composer.

EARLS: Let me respond to that. It happens all the time, and I think that it's one of the great failings of this university system that a person usually falls precisely between two different sit uations. He's very hard to accommodate in that, and really do it with great honesty and candor, because what you obviously have to do, and what I do ifl have to do it, is say, "Well, look, that's not what we do in here and we've got another way to do that," and take that other way, making it a little bit easier for him perhaps. That happens all the time, but it's one of the reasons that I like to split off the two subjects. He's already made a commitment to saying, "I want to do some really good work of my own." All right, then I think we can do that.

JOHN ROGERS: It occurs to me that you probably have a very different approach to undergraduate harmony from the view that everyone is creative. I want us to get an idea if per haps undergraduate harmony and composition are similar. Per haps you would like to do away with the undergraduate har mony and just have composition.

BROWNE: Yes, I'll do away with undergraduate harmony, and yes I will be for a course in undergraduate composition, but not in place of it. What I would replace undergraduate harmony with is not a subject of this panel. I can't even think about it at this point in time. The question is whether we 're dealing with the absolute necessity of exposing the composer's mind to every young musician or are we talking about this guy who 72 says, "No, I'm a composer." The only thing I can remember is a clue that seems to have worked out, and I sound like an old man in my career teaching composition. The ones that worked out were stubborn; they would not let me push them around, they were infuriating, they did everything for themselves, they let me argue and beat at them. That was the key; they would not accept anything from me without testing it themselves. In other words they were going through a process of discovering; they did not want to be inventors. The world's full of inventive composers who can invent another piece like the one they invented last week. The stubborn ones want to be discoverers; they want to find out something about the human process of listening to music, or the human reaction to time or sound, or whatever it is, and discover it all over for themselves; some kind of universal truth that they must remake for themselves. And maybe a piece of music will be the result.

CHARLES WHITTENBERG: I would merely like to ask if any of the panel feel that theory and composition are merely the obverse of each other, or the converse. There used to be this very great continental divide between theory and composition. Are we not when we're teaching theory, looking at real music, finding Bach's errors?--Mr. Ward-Steinman was very eloquent about this. Can't this be transferred by the budding composer to his own problems, be they from whatever style, whatever modus operandi he uses and say, "Look here, here is one way, transmute this into a piece"? Can't you build a sort of backlog of musical erudition in to the so-called theory curriculum; then transfer it into its creative "garden", so to speak?

SPIES: Since you've used my analogy, I would say yes, defi nitely, and I would like to get back (since it seems to me that we are in danger of becoming mystical and much too broad) to your piano student. I would say that piano students, in my estimation, don't need to have courses in composition, but they need courses in analysis, at least insofar as that will teach them to study the pieces they play, not just from the point of view of what finger to wiggle at what time, but what the piece is made up of, how it's put together, I think that they can infer from an analysis what is relevant to a good performance of the piece, and what is relevant to bei ng a good musician. I don't think they need go through the process, the painful process, of trying to put together a pi ece of music themselves, since I don't subscribe to the notion that all human beings are paten- tially composers. I don't believe that at all. I think that what is 73 most useful to a performer is what can teach him the essence of the piece he's playing; that need not be the writing of music himself.

HEIDEN: After all we are trained musicians. I think, in many instances, the pianist who is interested in composition will be a good pianist. Very rarely will you find someone who is already a bad pianist and who then wants to be a bad composer. More likely you will get good pianists who wish to become good composers and better pianists. We really don't have to worry too much about that.

CHILDS: We've got to make a distinction here; how sentimental are we going to be? Are we going to save everybody's soul or are we simply teaching people to be musicians as craftsmen, as artisans; what are we going to do? I would suggest that Mr. Howe's theoretical student transfer to the College of Business Administration. I think such a person as you have described is fundamentally a bomb-out, and my sentimentality coefficient is perhaps higher than yours. I'm not mystical about this matter. I think that past a certain point it is not the university teacher's business to follow up with these people. He gives them what he can up to a point; beyond this if he insists on sentimentally or mystically or psychologically trying to con himself into goading them along, fine, he'll probably be much liked and probably be a good teacher; but is this really what we're trying to do? Where do we stop spoon-feeding? As a very slight offshoot to the thing about whether per formers should take composition; how about piano proficiency requirements for composing students?

MANDELBAUM: This is an issue that we discovered the panel to be quite divided on.

HOWE: I think I've found that even with a bad student who wants to become a composer, you can still teach him quite a bit.

CHILDS: You can teach him double-entry bookkeeping. 74 MANDELBAUM: If he wants to be a composer you can teach him things about double-entry bookkeeping that he won't listen to from an economics professor.

CHILDS: This is true.

EARLS: I think there are certain things that we 're loading on and have loaded on these lower division theory programs that I'd like to see taken out. I think composition is one of them. Like everyone else here, when I used to go around to job interviews I would wax every eloquent for the necessity for the creative approach, whatever that is, in studying these things, and I really sometimes think I was being very dishonest about it; I was looking more for a job than I was being honest about my viewpoint; It sounded right but I really didn't want to look at it very closely. I do think that there are certain subject materials and facts and attitudes, analytical attitudes, that are a pre requisite for anyone who's going to call himself a musician, and these can be taught. I think they are very ideally taught by composers. Obviously, I think all of us would agree.

About the 20th century thing, about music today, in our living memory. That is a necessity for anyone who calls himself a musician, just as 16th century and everything else is. Maybe a composer's good to do that. I don't think he's necessarily the only person who can do that, but he can do a pretty good job of it because he's obviously conversant with it. He usually brings his prejudices and his bags into that one, and a little bit more violently than into the semi-cool analytical situations where he's not loading the situation too much to the prejudice of the student. These I think are absolute necessities for anyone well educated. I camp up with the idea that a composer is some sort of a special being, and I probably still live with that, al though I think that a lot of people probably have the material, it is, I think, a rather special calling, and there's a special mantle you put on when you do that, so consequently I don't think that you should require that that mantle be put on with out some sort of decision, a commitment on someone's part, tentative or otherwise.

CLIFFORD TAYLOR: The matter of creativity is simply the matter of will. It seems to me that what the composer is looking for is the will to do it. Now I subscribe to Mr. Heiden's position in that as far as I'm concerned I'm one of the initial possible audiences for the student composer. It is my job to talk back 75 in an interested and concerned way about what he does, and that's the extent of my position. Going to your remark, Claudio, about teaching pianists or giving them insights through analysis, although that's extremely necessary and valuable if you want to get him inside a composer's mind, which is very probably not possible, but if you want to you have to get him inside the area where the will is the primary fact of the creative process, and you can only do that by letting him do something, compose. If somebody comes in with a bad piece I will admire him because it represents will, if nothing else. Who knows, Schoenberg took two years to write a good piece; if the will hadn't been there he might not have gotten through those two years.

SPIES: The will you're speaking about is obviously the piece that the pianist is playing. What greater manifestation of the will is there than that?

TAYLOR: That's somebody else's will.

SPIES: Yes, but that's what he's dealing with. If he wants to play that piece well it will be essential for him to penetrate it as deeply as possible.

TAYLOR: Right, but it won't tell him what it feels like to have that will to make another piece.

SPIES: But that's not his concern, that's not his business.

TAYLOR: What is essential in my opinion is what it feels like to want to put some stuff down, to make something; and it's the wanting to that makes the composer above anything else.

MANDELBAUM: Perhaps this is the Wagnerian Noth, need to express.

TAYLOR: Well, need to express it is a fact, it's not metaphysi cal or mystical, it's simply a fact. There is one person who has 76 a will to mess with these things, and there are thousands of other people who don't care whether they ever put a note on paper or conceptualize anything. That is a fact.

WARD-STEINMAN: Something concerns me that I would like to bring up before the panel. All the comments this morning arise from the assumption that some of our traditional values are still operative, whereas we may well be in a period of change. and none of this is going to be relevant. My question is this: What do you do with the traditional composition major who comes in and only wants to write graphic music, chance music, or mixed media, where he doesn't want to read notes and claims that all these criteria and skills are useless to him? I want to ask you very specifically what your position would be in this.

CARLETON GAMER: I'd like to ask a question in response to that: What does he want of you; what does he expect of you?

EARLS: Well, I think that's the answer. I do subscribe to the contract between student and teacher. If it's not there nothing is going to happen and you might as well admit it if it's not there. It's somewhat arrogant for me to tell anyone else what to do in that sense, and if he's fully committed to his horns and his graphs or whatever else he wants to do, I may be inter ested in it and I may be able to deal with him to an extent, but my point of view of that would be that I want to, as Mr. Heiden was saying, find out what he's after, and I would like to be able to evaluate, and be able to tell him, so that he believes me, whether he's accomplished what he wants to do. Some where along the line I have to make a value judgment, I suppose, as to whether that's a viable activity for an intelligent being, but I hope to avoid that kind of a judgment. Frankly, I would just like to be able to ask the question, "Is that what you want; is that exactly the way that you'd want it; what do you mean there; if that's not what you want there why don't you change it?" But I won't make a judgment.

I'd just like to tack this on as a coda, if it really comes to what Mr. Whittenberg asked before. I really don't see those undying musical assumptions that seem to exist mystically in all musics. You understand some particular kind of music and some mysterious manner of osmosis gives you insight into some unshakable musical facts or constructions. I've never seen those. I do an awful lot of study on non-western music; I just don't 77 see them operative. Maybe they're there and operative in a com pletely indistinguishable manner to my senses.

WARD-STEINMAN: Well , that perhaps is another basic assump tion that needs to be questioned. We've all come up through, I think, the traditional theory and musicianship training, and perhaps a topic for a future panel might well be how relevant this is.

MANDELBAUM: A lot of the regions have had such panels very recently, and most have concluded that they still are relevant; at least the New York panel seemed to be pretty much in agreement, and it had people like Milton Babbitt and Ben Boretz on it.

BROWNE: The far west panel concluded exactly the opposite, I think.

That question about the young man is fairly easy. He said that he wanted to do something, and I'd say go ahead and go do it. But we give a degree which is used to go into the field of teaching, and nobody's going to ask you to teach that, so you have two choices: Go out and do what you want to do, or let us teach you, take the degree, join the profession and change things from within.

I'd just like to make one more point about the role of the composer in the university. There are at least a couple of things that are, perhaps, more important for a composer to be doing than sitting here talking about whether he should teach com position. Certainly one of them is to use his influence in his school. If he has this point of insight we talked about he should try to convince his fellow faculty members to change educa tional standards in all sorts of courses that he doesn't teach. I see our composers all over the country copping out of this very important job, running home and saving their three days a week to compose. I should think many of them would be much better off attending committee meetings.

CHILDS: I'd like to comment on the fellow who wanted to write music for automobile horns. I would simply quote him 78 your analogy about the inventor of the telephone and then send him to the literature and show him that it's already been done, and he'd bloody well better plan to do it better or not fool with it at all. This is the trouble now with so-called avant-garde music. It is just now getting down to the undergraduate level and everyone thinks light shows and all this jazz is the new thing. It's deader than Moses! It was done ten years ago, far better than any of these kids could do it, and if you show this to them, then maybe they get the idea that maybe there's some thing to this idea that learning a little bit about music is im portant and this sort of "wild talent" is not all. Send him to the sources, send him back to Bach and say, "O.K. Jack, it's been done better." If he brings me a graph piece, it's almost without exception going to be an unbearably bad one. I show him why, and have him go look at good ones and say, "Now, what do you want?"

HOWE: There is another issue that was briefly discussed which I'd like to have clarified because I don't really understand it. This is the notion that Mr. Ward-Steinman brought up that there are errors in a piece by Bach.

WARD-STEINMAN: "Errors" in quotes, of course.

HOWE: Well I still want you to clarify exactly what that could mean, and how you would use this as a tool to teach the student.

WARD-STEINMAN: By "errors" what I really meant was ex ceptional procedures that are out of the norm; what McHose used to catalogue as the "one-to-three-percent-frequency." We never got around to explaining why but I always found these most interesting. Virtually always these exceptions are a result of voice leadings, for the sake of a more beautiful line, if I may use the adjective, or I'll say a more "musical" result. The minute you try to regularize these, and use the traditional doubling or traditional voice leading, the music suffers. I think this is a demonstrable fact, a fairly objective one. I try to get the student to see this, to see the alternatives and discover why Bach tripled the root and had one third here, for example, instead of some thing else. If they can see that it isn't just some mechanical relic of the past, but that musical and intelligent choice is at work here, I would hope that there would be some transfer between this experience and contemporary experience, in fact 79 between this and any other music that we consider of value. Not that they are to take my judgment or anyone else's, but they are to develop criteria for getting inside a piece to see what makes it tick, and whether it can be made to tick any better.

HOWE: I think that's a good answer.

JEFFREY LERNER: I'm slightly appalled that I only heard one comment to the effect that a composer might actually receive something in giving something in a classroom experience. Do any of you ever get anything?

EARLS: Yes, but on the other hand there is a dual thing, and you have to balance it. That's one of the reasons I cringe when you talk about committee meetings, because that to me is a sheer drain. I don't see anything coming back to me. Perhaps I feel like I'm doing something for the university ; that's a fairly arrogant stance, I don't know that I'm going to do anything for any university at all except be a composer. If I can do that, that's enough. I think there is something that's gained from teaching, and the gain is that you're constantly kept on your toes, and I would personally prefer to get that gain mostly from my students, not from my fellow composers.

LERNER: Keep you on your toes? There must be something of deeper significance than that.

WARD-STEINMAN: If I may risk another quote with out fear of rebuttal from Barney, I would bring up Picasso's maxim, "You should not teach children to paint; you should learn from them." I think in a sense that this is what Mr. Lerner has in mind. I hope to get a great deal more from students; not just keeping me on my toes, but keeping me alive through new id eas an d new responses. I think the teaching experien ce is a very valuable one for your own composing.

EARLS: There's a stance that comes off, but it's a very dan gerous one for the composer when he gets in the classroom, and that is that he becomes an authority and he starts talking 80 like he knows exactly what he's talking about and he knows the final word, and you begin to believe it after a while. It's really sad, but it's a kind of a necessity to be convincing. You begin to feel like you have got to have something to say to these people. On the other hand, you start believing it yourself, and you can believe that you're an oracle, and I've seen composers do it and I've seen other professors doing it. It's not a failing of the music teaching profession but I think it's a very, very dangerous failing for a composer as a person to have that feeling that he knows that much about anything.

WARD-STEINMAN: This is bad teaching, I think. The best he can do is ask the right questions and let the student discover for himself.

MANDELBAUM: What about the use of classroom techniques in which the teacher of composition is not the first audience, although I suppose in a way he has to be, but is perhaps the second audience and the student's peers are the first audience?

HEIDEN: We do that all the time.

EARLS: You're the referee then.

MANDELBAUM: Maybe there is nothing to referee, just simply a diversity of reactions which the composer himself is free to play with as he wishes.

AUDIENCE: Could I raise the question of grading a compo sition student?

SPIES: I think the answer to that is simply a grade that is not is any detailed sense evaluative; it is mainly a grade to show that the person will pass or fail. I don't think that any other grading system is equitable.

HEIDEN: Well, pass-fail is ideal but it can't be accepted by the university unless it goes through the entire university without damaging the average of the students. I just want to say that I 81 don't think an examination is possible at all. I have never given an examination in composition. I have a day at the end of the semester where the student brings everything he has done from the semester.

EARLS: In many ways I don't think it's any more difficult to grade this kind of activity than any other, but I'd like to turn the phrasing around; I think it's just as difficult to grade pro gress in other subjects, in other fields, as it is in composition because you have to have a point of view as to whether you are grading progress or attainment, and this is a definite problem and I think there are a whole variety of reasons that go behind a grade. I'm never sure of any grade that I give for anything. I really can't feel that definite about it, and the way I test that to myself is in thinking back upon a student, trying to remem ber whether I failed him or I gave him an A; but the range in between I can't even remember. If I can't remember even what grade I gave him at that time, obviously it had no great impact upon my own mind. As far as composition, I agree with Mr. Spies. It would be best to sort of cop out in a sense on grading and just say, "You're doing fine," or "I think that I want to encourage you," whatever that means; "You've done the work that we expect of you, minimally at least, or perhaps more," or, "You haven't done it," and that really means, "Con tinue composing," or, "Don't continue composing," I suppose. That's the translation of it. I think we can do that. The other thing about grading is this business either that you do at least in thesis work and things like that, turn out a document. Now, the content of the document is one thing but actually there are conventions and certain necessities attached and I think that this is where standards come in; that you require in notation not legibility so much as clarity of thought presented in a score and that is appreciable to anyone who can deal with that. This is one of the primary concerns of grading as such, just as a scholarly paper has the same kind of strictures put upon itself, that it has certain conventions that it must follow. I think we can do that in composition to a degree but that's not grading as such, really. It's an avoidance; it's a cop out.

MANDELBAUM: I found teaching composition for the first time much harder to grade than other courses, and in that respect I partially found myself with Mr. Earls in that I could not remember the grades that I had given my composition stu- 82 dents even though I usually have a frighteningly accurate mem ory of the grades I gave students in other courses, often years later. I think part of the reason was that I felt above all that the last thing I wanted to base the grade on was my subjective evaluation of how good a composer each of them was.

HEIDEN: Actually we should tell people early that they are no good and that they won't be successful. It's very dangerous giving everybody B and a few A. It would be much better to tell people, "Look, you will not make it after a bachelor's degree."

ROGERS: I just wanted to clarify the question I asked before, or restate it in some sense. What I was trying to get at was a number of tendencies in the discussion, one of which seemed to imply one way of looking at any musical work of a student, that is, anything he wrote down, as a kind of composition, whether it was a theory exercise or an actual piece, or whatever it happened to be. That was something like that I was trying to get at when I asked Richmond that question. Would there be a way in which you might rethink the whole basic program of composition or theory or whatever they were called, with that in mind?

BROWNE: That is a question I refuse to answer, except to say that my idea for the first two years is concept-oriented, student experience and change-of-experience and analytically oriented. Composition is extremely clumsy when used as a teaching tool at that level.

AUDIENCE: What we were talking about was that you must be able to tell a person that he will or he won't be able to go on. Now, how can you take care of that delicately?

HEIDEN: You can't. It's not a delicate question. You can all ow some time. You cannot tell somebody after one month that he won't be able to do it, but I think after a year you can.

BROWNE: You don't have to tell him , he'll find out. He knows what you think. You don't have to bring it out and say, "Now I'm going to give my last judgment." EARLS: Also there's something else in that, and when a person 83 declares that he's interested in becoming a composer, he's sticking his neck out to start with. I think they all realize it, and the answer can be no.

HEIDEN: But we are not talking about composers, we're talking about degrees, and there is still some difference between earning a degree in composition and becoming a composer. A PhD is a teaching degree which certifies a teacher of composition.

SPIES: I think though something we have to take into account is the method of not only of what to teach, and of what meth ods to use, if indeed any, that there's another side to it: the question of how to deal with quantities of students. Do you teach composition optimally to a group or an individual? I would side very definitely with the individual. I cannot con ceive of teaching a class in composition and I know that I myself, when I was in classes in composition, learned absolutely nothing and wasted years. I would say it has to be done pri vately for two reasons: If you're dealing with a composer, with a person about whom you have little doubt that he will go on, you're dealing with that most sensitive area in that person's makeup, and that which deservedly should be given the greatest amount of attention by the teacher, yourself. I think you re quire privacy for that, and you also can deal with the individual pieces that the student will present to you best, naturally, if there is nobody else around. That, in turn, facilitates, on the other end of things, for the hopeless student, your telling him in humane terms, by making him see what his failings are, that it's unlikely that he would be able to compose.

HEIDEN: May I violently contradict? I've done both, but I've done much more teaching in small groups of two, three, four people. Students teach each other an awful lot and the student will see how he stands as a composer continuously. I don't have to tell him he is no good. He sees it simply by somebody else being there in a situation where the students observe each other. I've found that much more successful.

CHILDS: It's got to be both. A group up to eight or ten should meet together some of the time and be forced to play each other's works, deal with each other's works. Then you have 84 individual meetings with them. I think this is the best of both possible worlds. As far as telling people that they're not going to make it, in the undergraduate level they will find out there eventually through the syllabus machinery. It should be done, perhaps, if it must be done, personally and as humanely as possible. On the other hand nothing in any graduate degree program that I know of has even been known for any kind of humanity, graciousness, or gentility.

GAMER: We've done no more than to generalize about one of the questions implied by the topic today, which is "If so, how?" I'd be interested to hear what some of the panelists have to say about that. Schoenberg had an idea "how" in his book, the one that was published last year by St. Martin's: You teach "form." So often great composers of the past have learned how in a very mechanical fashion. In the Renaissance they studied Tinctoris, or they studied Gradus Ad Parnassum, species counterpoint and so on, and when they studied with each other they did the same thing, they learned from each other. Beethoven studied with Albrechtsberger, and Schoenberg's students learned from him how to write motives, phrases, periods, sentences, liquidations, and all this sort of thing. In a sense they weren't studying what we regard a composition.

EARLS: I think it is in many ways misleading to look at past procedures which have turned out great men. Perhaps if Beethoven hadn't studied with Albrechtsberger he would have been a lousy composer, who knows? All of these questions are very time-wasting, they don't shed light on anything. We have a unique situation today in this country in that we have an academic set-up that is running the musical world, in a sense, and really I think many of us are too young to know what's going to be the result of that. Most of us are the results of that system and I think even now the evidence is not clear enough to know whether it's been a disastrous failure or wheth er there's some hope. It's a different system, and it's going to come out with something different.

MANDELBAUM: Would the other panelists like to answer Mr. Gamer's question?

CHILDS: I suspect maybe my problem is a little different because most of the people who come to study with someone do so voluntarily and my thing, as some of you know, is per- 85 haps a little different from what is normally done in most university music departments. I think I try to teach in three simultaneous ways. One is trying to understand the nature of music; putting sounds together in time in a particular syntax, and have the student investigate various syntaxes and think all the time about what music, structure and form are. Form is what "happens," I tell them. Structure is what we impose upon it by acculturation. Go on from there. How do these things work? The second part is the business I was talking about earlier, the trade: getting them to put the stems on the right side of the notes, not to use regular Scotch tape to make patches with, and to use the right ink. This is constantly going on -- trying to get them to write legible manuscripts, making them deal with instrumentalists. Finally, the exercises I give are usually extraordinary ones rather than conventional ones. There's a tuba competition for multiple tubas which has been going on. I. tell my students, "There's a tuba competition. You're going to write a piece for four tubas," or, "Write a piece using only four pitches next to each other," or "Here are seven pitches. Take a minute and 50 seconds and put them together in time so that they come out right." Instead of "Write a little prelude," I say, "Write four children's pieces." This is the kind of thing I do; drop them from any angle and see if they can still land on their feet. I guess that's my phi losophy.

EARLS: I think I use some of that to a degree. I'm at Duke and there are two composers there, Iain Hamilton and myself. Iain and I work together very well since we have a maximum of five or six composers at one time who we deal with jointly, which is a marvelous luxury, so that consequently we can afford to be in some ways rather arbitrary. We can use ourselves as two paddles, bouncing students back and forth, and we do this constantly. Sometimes it's not even verbalized, but we realize it. He will take a stance and I'll take another stance. We set up a polarity between ourselves.

On the technical level of what you do with students: We've tried having open sessions with anyone who seems to be in terested at all. The composers are invited to just come and sit around for a while and observe someone else's writing and see if that turns him on in any way, and then, as I keep saying, make that contract: "I want to write music." Well what do I ask them to do initially? I ask them to generate something, 86 construct some idea of what they'd like to reali ze in a piece of music and it's a little bit more specifi c than a ni ce clean piece for flute and viola. It's something that's supposed to happen musically within that piece, that they ca n describe verbally in some way or another. I always tell them that they don't have to follow that ; they can change their mind along the way, and we can check out whether it's rea lly that interesting an idea after they get going with it, but at least it gives them something that they themselves have ge nerated , ra ther than my saying, " Write a passacaglia," which I did and loathed. They have their own idea and they're try ing to live up to their own idea . I think that that's a very important process in composing at any time. You set yourse lf a task and then grade yourse lf against it, sometimes with some help from someone else.

The o ther quality that we use that works very well is that we have a number of students around who like to play con temporary music. They're not music majors, very often they're in the world of "science" and " fi ction" and all that ; they 're over there. They like to pl ay so we usuall y try to design pieces for them . We fi gure we have a reservoir of this kind of per forming talent at a given time and we use the university as a lab or our composers. We tell them to ge t involved with the drama department, to ge t involved writing for this that and the other. If there's a radio station we tell them to do that kind of work. You're finding out something about the way music works - your own music - the way it works and doesn't work. I think it's a very important function of the university to be a proving ground for yourself.

HEIDEN: I just want to talk about one aspect ; that's the workshop that we have where everybody who's studying com position, from freshman to doctoral students, come together . This is a group of about thirty to forty people. We meet one evening a week for about an hour and a half. For the last year we have had various instruments come in : a violinist , a horn player, a trombone player. We ask the composer to write ten measures of something for that particular instrument; it is play ed, rea d, di scussed , criticized . The student's not to write a piece, rather something he wants to try out, to find out. I think over the years this is what students have liked , and learned by . The other teaching I do, as I said, is in small groups, some times privately. SPIES : What I do is obviously dependent on the level of com- 87 petence, of experi ence of each student, and since each student will be in the middle of a pi ece when he comes for his in stru cti on, that piece will be the basis fo r the in struction that I give him. Bas icall y , what I ask the student to do is t o account for every note, accoun t for everything that he does in terms that needn't be in essay form, obviously, bu t he has to be able to impart to me his reasons fo r hi s choices, so that he is made aware of the responsi bility fo r every note, every res t, every dynamic and every detail that he writes. This, therefore involves me to a certain extent in questions of accura te notation and basic questions of that sort. I don't like to assign a type of piece to a student because I assume that the student will be wanting to write a certain kind of piece at any give n time, and I will tell to go ahead and write it and we'll see what turns out. If, however, such a student should be stuck, then I find ways of dealing with that problem by suggesting a certain kind of piece to ge t him unstuck, or a combination of instruments or maybe a solo in strument, just to ge t him writing. I think the main thing that I stress in teaching a young composer is that he produce constantly .

BROWN E: I use the Socratic method. I ask him a question and he asks m ~ a question. The fi rst question is usually, "Who asked you to be a composer? I didn't. Why are you here? What makes you think I can teach you anything? What would you like to know? Wh at would you like to try to do? Why would you like to do that? What does that involve?" I want them to treat me as a resource person. The thing that the student has got to face up to is that the process of becoming a composer is a process of coming to grips with himself, and I can't do that for him. When he discovers that he can do it for himself, then he has no use for me except as that why machine.

MANDELBAUM : Our thanks to our paneli sts and all of you.

Performance Demonstration: 89 The New World of Sound

BERTRAM TURETZKY, CONTRABASSIST

The search for new sounds and techniques was a result of my unwillingness to conceive of the contrabass as a clumsy, poor relative of the cello. I wanted to play an instrument with its own individual and personal sound spectrum and not be bound to imitating another string instrument whose " sound ideal" was still firmly rooted in the 19th century aesthetic. In order to break the umbilical cord to the cello, I turned to the sound world of the East, jazz, and plucked stringed instruments.

The starting point of my work was the re-evaluation of the pizzicato technique, which has been a barren wasteland in western art music. Pizzicato technique had over a half century tradition in jazz and after much research I saw its culmination in the work of the late Scott La Faro. It seemed as if La Faro had taken the instrument into "orbit." The traditional pizzicato technique using one or two fingers had developed into a 4 or 5 finger technique with the velocity of a guitarist! Conceptually, 90 enormous changes were brought about, but it is the agility, accuracy, and velocity that concerned me.

It was very obvious that my direction was not toward more velocity but toward new vistas of color and timbre. My own personal investigation of the jazz pizz. technique brought forth the pizzicato tremolo, which is reminiscent of the plectrum instruments such as the Oud, Bazooki, and Spanish guitar. The first appearance of the technique in print is found in the "Concert for Double Bass Alone (1961 ), " written for me by Charles Wuorinen. Since then, this technique has gradually found its way into the literature. In The Ricercar a 3 (1967) 1 Robert Erickson makes monumental use of this technique in both lyrical expressive and bravura coloristic passagework.

In the late l 950's another pizzicato technique using the thumb (instead of the other fingers) as a plectrum evolved in an attempt to emulate the two of my musical heroes ~ the guitarist Andres Segovia and Joseph Iadone the lutenist. The dark, full sound, which I called pizzicato ala guitarra (chittara, guitar pizz.) lent itself to a sustained, lyric type of writing. The earliest, most significant employment of the 'technique is found in "Monody No. 2 for Solo Double Bass" written for me in 1962 by George Perle. 2 The use of registration in pizzicato, as well as arco, became a part of my demonstrations in the late 'SO's and is rapidly appearing in the repertoire.

Employment of the left hand alone technique rose from, obscurity to the prophetic use by Thomas Fredrickson in his "Music for the Double Bass Alone" (1963), Fredrickson's pairing of left hand alone over a pizz. tremolo drone produced a quasi sitar two part writing . that telescoped the "Ravi Shankar Revolution" by approximatelythree years. It is Robert Erickson that brings this technique into the literature in complete fruition. The fusion with the guitar pizzicato, pizzicato tremolo, and glissandi brought about by Erickson will within this generation, of composers and performers, firmly establish the lyric pizzicato technique as a basic and important aspect of the instrument's idiomatic potential.

In 1960, I came upon a way to produce 8 sets of harmonics, instead of the normal four. By pulling the string to the side, directly at the node, you can raise the pitch a microtone,

1. Recorded by Mr. Turetzky on ARS NOVA . 2. Recorded by Mr. Turetzky for Advance Recordings. semitone or more.3 The innovative "Monody No. 2" (1962) of 91 G. Perle was the 1st printed composition to employ "pulled harmonics." Poignant use of this technique is found in a microtonally coloured duo section for piccolo and contrabass in Richard Felciano's "Spectra."4

The monumental transformation of the pianoforte, by Cowell and Cage, into a sound producing instrument ranging from a gamelan to an eerie Celtic harp has a parallel develop ment in the percussive use of string instruments. Because of the great resonance of the contrabass, composers are beginning to use it percussively. 5 The hands are the most practical sound generator and we distinguish at least five different techniques: knuckle, palm, fingertip, fingernail , and cupped hand which produce 5 very different timbres. These five can be employed to rap, tap or slap the ribs, neck, top, back, bridge, scroll, tailpiece, or fingerboard. Combinations of these, as well as the numerous permutations available when using both hands, give composers and performers tremendous possibilities. However, I and many others with pedigreed instruments are very discreet about tapping, rapping, and slapping, and the thought of using a bow or mallet to strike any part of the instrument except the scroll or the tailpiece is considered blasphemous. Notable use of the percussive potential are found in Barney Childs' "Mr. T., His Fancy:' (1967)6 and the Erickson Ricercar.

Many of the newer compositions employ vocal sounds, as well as sounds produced from the contrabass, but, like all other new sounds discussed, they became part of the vocabu lary of the individual composer and are an indigenous part of his music. This reminds me of what Edgard Varese said when writers grouped him with Marinetti, Russolo, and the Futurists: "The Futurists believed in reproducing sounds literally; I believe in the metamorphosis of sounds in to music."

3. This technique is idiomatic to the blues guitarist and its transformation at the double bass should be credited to the inimitable Charles Mingus, Jazz Bassist extraordinaire. 4. Recorded by the Turetzkys on ARS NOVA. 5 . See my article "The Bass as a Drum," The Composer, No. 2, Sept. 1969. 6. Recorded by Mr. Turetzky on ARS NOVA.

Membership List 93 November, 1970

ISTVAN ANHALT RULE BEASLEY Faculty of Music Department of Music McGill University North Texas State University 3500 Redpath Denton, Texas 76203 Montreal, P. Q. Canada BURTON BEERMAN JON APPLETON 4770 Washtenaw , Apt.BI Wenner-Gren Ctr. - Apt. B23 Ann Ar bor, Michigan 48 104 Sveavagen 166 S 113 46 Stockholm, Sweden JACK BEESON Department of Music BRUCE ARCHIBALD Columbia University 22 East Gorgas Lane New York, N. Y. 10027 Philadelphia, Pa. 1911 9 ALLAN BLANK WALTER ASCHAFFENBURG Mu sic Department 49 Shipherd Circle Herbert H. Lehman Co ll ege (CUNY) Oberlin, Ohio 44074 Bed ford Park Blvd. West Bronx, N. Y. I 0468 MILTON BABBITT 242 East 19 Street ALFREDW. BLATTER New York, N. Y. 10003 904 Holiday Drive Champaign, Illinois 61820 MICHAEL J. BABCOCK University Apts. - East 128 ADAM. BLIESENER 1603 East 3rd Bethany College Bloomington, Ind. 47401 Lindsborg, Kansas 67456

TIBOR BACHMAN ALLEN BONDE Music Department Hood College West Chester State College Frederick, Maryland West Chester, Pa. 19380 BENJAMI N BORETZ 225 West 86 St. ELAINE BARKIN New York, N. Y. 10024 School of Music University of Michigan ELLIOT BORISHANSKY Ann Arbor, Michigan 48 105 520 W. Broadway Granville, Ohio 43023 LESLIE M. BASSETT School of Music BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY University of Michigan Serials Receipts No. P00437 Ann Arbor, Michigan 48 105 Boston, Mass. 02117 94 WILL GAY BOTTJE CHOU WEN-CHUNG 914 Taylor Drive 22 East 10 Street Carbondale, Illinois 62901 New York, N. Y. 10003

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MARTIN BOYKAN GUSTAV CIAMAGA 155 Sumner Street Electronic Music Studio Newton Center, Mass. 02160 University of Toronto Toronto 5, Canada ALLEN BRINGS 199 Mountain Road JOHN L. CLOUGH, JR. Wilton, Conn. 06897 Department of Music University of Michigan RICHMOND BROWNE Ann Arbor, Michigan 48105 School of Music University of Michigan DAVID COHEN Ann Arbor, Michigan 48105 Music Department Arizona State University RICHARD BUNGER Tempe, Arizona 85281 303 South Avenue 57 Los Angeles, Calif. 90042 WILSON COKER 16 19 West Robinwood Lane DAVID BURGE Fresno, Calif. 93705 Department of Music University of Colorado RANDOLPH COLEMAN Boulder, Colorado 80302 224 Woodland Avenue Oberlin, Ohio 44074 GEORGE BURT School of Music EDWARD T. CONE University of Michigan 18 College Road West Ann Arbor, Michigan 48 105 Princeton, N. J. 08540

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CHRISTOPHER S. GALLAHER JACKSON HILL Music Department Department of Music Frostburg State College Bucknell University Frostburg, Maryland 21532 Lewisburg, Pa. 17837 96 LEJAREN A. HILLER, JR. JEAN EICHELBERGER IVEY 59 Sargent Drive 83-33 Austin Street Snyder, N. Y. 14226 Kew Gardens, N. Y. 11415

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